Palindrome Entrepreneurship: when Reverse Innovation meets social entrepreneurship

Nowadays, innovation is no longer a prerogative of developed countries: the rise of emerging is slowly shifting the locus of innovation from developed to the developing economies. This inversion of the flow is known as “Reverse Innovation” (RI): the term was coined in 2009 by Immelt, Govindarajan, and Trimble and it refers to an innovation that is adopted first in a poor country before being adopted in rich countries. Among the issues that scholars face when investigating this phenomenon, there is the possible overlapping with other concepts: therefore, we are going to investigate the connection within Reverse Innovation and social entrepreneurship. The aim of this research is to firstly highlights the boundaries of both the concepts and secondly, demonstrate how Reverse Innovation actually overlaps with social entrepreneurship, developing a taxonomy that highlights the contact points among these two phenomena: it is a conceptual paper, based on an explorative analysis through some case studies.