Hari Nair
Hari Nair is a Partner at Innosight Ventures, with a primary focus on India and emerging markets. Hari is responsible for the incubation and early stage evolution of several pro-poor scalable micro-enterprises, including Village Laundry Services, Razor Rave, Peepal Finance, and Portrait Shop.
Hari joined Innosight in late 2006, where he helped setup Innosight’s activities India, working with several of India’s top companies and generating a strong network of believers and practitioners of Disruptive Innovation across India. His on the ground understanding of emerging markets and in particular unmet ‘jobs’ which exist for the millions of underserved and overshot consumers who reside in these markets, helped him co-develop several disruptive innovations for both Innosight and their clients. Since 2008, Hari has been the key driver of Innosight Venture’s socially focused efforts, engineering several businesses which substantially increase the income levels of the urban and rural poor, while creating services which are more accessible to India’s growing middle class.
Prior to joining Innosight, Hari was with the Global Research and Development group at Procter & Gamble for 14 years. From P&G's global headquarters in Cincinnati USA, Hari led numerous product and packaging innovations including the launch of several new brands for the North American market. In 2002, Hari moved to Beijing, China where he helped lead P&G's scaled up efforts serving low income markets across Asia. He commercialized several new product and value based innovations in the consumer goods sector for China, Philippines, Vietnam, and India. After his assignment in China, Hari joined Cadbury Schweppes, leading their Science & Technology group out of Mumbai.
Hari has significant experience and skills in product design and development, building teams, and shaping ideas through an emergent process. Hari continues to be recognized as an expert in consumer modeling, fast cycle consumer testing, early stage incubation, as well as utilizing open innovation (developing external connections) for speeding up innovations to market. Hari received his BS in Chemical Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he graduated with honors; he is also inventor/co-inventor on 8 patents.