In the recent years, a new typology of innovation emerges in the global innovation literature: i.e., the Reverse Innovation. The term was introduced by Immelt, Govindarajan and Trimble (2009) to refer to innovations that are originated in emerging countries and later launched in advanced economies. This phenomenon has been mostly neglected by scholars and it misses a complete understanding of which are the potential drivers and obstacles. The aim of our work is to understand if and how cultural factors could impact the inversion of the flow, increasing or slowing the process. A cross-cultural approach to the Reverse Innovation is totally absent and could help scholars and managers in understanding how to implement it successfully, even in culturally distant context. The study focuses on two different types of barriers: cognitive – more relevant in the mature economies – and operational (in terms of infrastructure) – crucial in the emerging countries-. This theoretical paper presents six propositions, elaborated on the Hofstede’s cultural dimensions of Power Distance, Individualism and Uncertainty Avoidance.