How I Met Your Market: CEO'S Professional Experience and Reverse Innovation in Indian Pharmaceutical Firms

Reverse innovation refers to an innovation first developed or adopted in an emerging economy before being further developed and/or adopted in advanced ones. Despite the growing research on reverse innovation over the past decade, its firm-level antecedents remain relatively unexplored. We examine how different dimensions of CEO professional experience can impact reverse innovation in multinational firms from emerging markets, drawing on Upper Echelons Theory and data from the ORBIS IP dataset alongside manually collected data. On a sample of 8301 India-USA patent dyads representing the reverse innovation of 143 pharmaceutical firms between 2014 and 2023, we find that firm-level experience and international experience of the CEO are positively associated with reverse innovation. In contrast, CEOs' overall professional work experience has a negative influence on a firm's reverse innovation capability, whereas multi-industry experience of CEOs shows no significant impact on reverse innovation. Our study contributes to the reverse innovation debate by disaggregating the specific aspects of CEO experience that enhance or hinder reverse innovation, with a specific focus on emerging market multinational firms.