Simone Ahuja

Simone Ahuja

Dr. Simone Ahuja is the principal of Blood Orange, a marketing and strategy advisory boutique with digital media capabilities, and special expertise in innovation. Headquartered in Minneapolis with teams in Mumbai, Blood Orange uses an agile and cost efficient content production framework built upon principles learned through extensive work in India, including "jugaad". Simone recently developed and produced the television series, Indique--Big Ideas from Emerging India for which she explored how innovation within India drives socio-economic development. The series was created based on extensive on the ground research and academic research conducted in partnership with the Centre for India & Global Business at the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School. This research, along with her personal experience in leveraging the complementary skill sets of transnational teams, and meetings with CEOs of multinational corporations as well as grassroots entrepreneurs heralding bottom-up, small scale innovation gave her a holistic, on-the-ground look at the methods and mindset of innovation employed in emerging markets, and its relevance in a global context.

Simone has served as an advisor to the Centre for India & Global Business at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge and as an Associate Fellow for the Asia Society, NYC. She provides advisory services and keynote presentations to trade delegations, academic institutions, and Fortune 100 companies including Pepsi Co, Procter & Gamble, Honeywell, General Mills, ECOLAB, Colgate-Palmolive and Best Buy Corp. She regularly contributes to a Harvard Business Review blog on HBR.org. Her upcoming book, Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth, co-authored with Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu and published by Jossey Bass, is due out in the US in April, 2012.