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"How should we understand the many reports that poverty is the mother of innovation in India? What has the role of austerity been in the development of India's knowledge economy? In this critical study of Indian innovation, or 'Indovation', Thomas Birtchnell explores how the complex mobilities of 'globals' with stakes in India have transformed discourses and imaginaries about innovation in the region. He adopts a critical eye to the notion of Indovation by focusing on the various circuits of globals where India's knowledge economy is concentrated: expertise, entrepreneurship and community. Birtchnell traces the various discourses and counter-discourses around an Indian way of working and illustrates how differences in the international dimensions of austerity allow India's knowledge economy to prosper."--Publisher's website.

As far back as the 19th century, the notion of a 'social pyramid' was critiqued in the social sciences as an inadequate and simplistic model of society. The model encourages the idea that those at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) are uniformly mediocre and the small number at the top overtly exceptional—social pyramid thinking not only tends to reflect differences in incomes but blends together other 'traits' such as talent, genius, values, practices and so on. Despite the disfavour in the social sciences throughout the 20th century about the notion of a social pyramid, the concept is now enjoying a renaissance in business, marketing and management theory in 'frontier' understandings of poverty in places such as Brazil and India. This article argues that the idea of vested 'globals' at the top of the pyramid (ToP) transgresses the concept of a social pyramid because India's ToP engages with the BoP from afar, remotely and in ways difficult to trace. Crucially, it is not those in India's BoP who are demanding of inquiry, but instead those at the ToP in terms of their stakes in India's austerity and their lived distance from these austere conditions.

Birtchnell and Hoyle explore how printers, designs, materials and infrastructures all need to be 'just right' in order for meaningful social change to happen with appropriate scale. The 3D4D Challenge suggests 3D printing could reach scale in the Global South, even perhaps having the same impact as the mobile phone or microfinance in development.

1. Introduction : the movement of the few / Thomas Birtchnell and Javier Caletrio -- 2. Elsewhere : tracking the mobile lives of globals / Anthony Elliott -- 3. Wealth segmentation and the mobilities of the super-rich : a conceptual framework / Jonathan V. Beaverstock and James R. Faulconbridge -- 4. Elite formation in the third industrial revolution / Thomas Birtchnell, Gil Viry and John Urry -- 5. Aeromobile elites : private business aviation and the global economy / Lucy Budd -- 6. Super-rich lifestyles / Mike Featherstone -- 7. The ease of mobility / Shamus Rahman Khan -- 8. The uneven pragmatics of "affordable" luxury tourism in inland Yucatan (Mexico) / Matilde Cordoba Azcarate, Ana Garcia Silberman and Juan Cordoba Ordonez -- 9. Visible-invisible : the social semiotics of labour in luxury tourism / Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski -- 10. "This is not me" : conspicuous consumption and the travel aspirations of the European middle classes / Javier Caletrio -- 11. Tracing the super rich and their mobilities in a Scandinavian welfare state / Malene Freudendal-Pedersen -- 12. The super-rich and offshore worlds / John Urry -- 13. Epilogue : the bodies, spaces and tempo of elite formations / Mimi Sheller -- 14. Postscript : elite mobilities and critique / Andrew Sayer.