45 Million People Are Blind today, and 80% of them could be cured through surgery (36 million if you’re looking for your calculator). Oh, of course, most of these people cannot afford the surgery, don’t know about it, cannot physically be where eye care is available, and so on and so on. The answer? Reverse Innovation (RI) – a term coined by Jeffrey Immelt and Vijay Govindarajan. The basic premise of RI is that all innovation cannot flow from the developed to the developing world.