Skip to main content

JUGAAD Innovation : A Frugal and Flexible Approach to Innovation for the 21st Century

A Frugal Approach to Success
How often have we licked an envelope to seal it in the absence of glue? Or how often we see auto rickshaws in India having a wooden ply right behind the driver’s seat to ferry more school students? 
A Jugaad through Wooden Ply 
Or how many times have we done with a make shift arrangement (used a string) for getting the cars falling bumper fixed? Or how many times have we felt triumphant when came up with a new way of doing the same thing which either resulted in savings in time, cost, energy, etc.? In our slang we call it either “Jhol” or “Jugaad”. The authors Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu and Simone Ahuja through their book “Jugaad Innovation : A Frugal and Flexible Approach to Innovation for the 21st Century” take us on a journey of “Jugaad” innovation in products and services which are shaping or have the potential to positively impact lives, the world over. They convincingly argue that how “jugaad” innovation is the need of the hour keeping in mind the rapidly changing business dynamics which range from depleting natural resources, ever increasing competition, rising awareness amongst customers, escalating costs, ageing population and fast changing trends among others. The “Jugaad” innovation scores over traditional systematic research through well equipped R&D labs and incubation centre as it curtails time and capital required. Another advantage of “Jugaad” innovation - it’s always bottoms-up, whereas, the same is not always true for the traditional research.

The authors list down six principles (qualities / essentials) each in the form of a chapter highlighting the must haves for a successful “jugaad” innovation. They also quote various examples of successful “juggad” ideas relating to each of these principles to drive home their point. The six principles are;
  • Seek Opportunity in Adversity
  • Do More with Less
  • Think and Act Flexibly
  • Keep it Simple
  • Include the Margin 
  • Follow Your Heart

Further, the authors explain how these principles can be integrated in an organizational set up and how even nations (economies) as a whole can inculcate the culture of “Jugaad” to utilise the available resources (natural, labour and capital) more productively.

The book is not without its share of shortfalls. In the very first sentence of the book, the authors have committed a glaring error by mentioning the Capital of Gujarat State in India as “Ahmedabad” instead of “Gandhinagar”. Further, there are few formatting and punctuation errors as we move along. But one can overlook the same. I have the Devil’s eye for errors.

Nonetheless, the book is a delight to read (even a non-reader will enjoy) and difficult to put down. The compelling real life stories of people and organizations trying to improve the lives of people and making this world a better place to live, are inspiring and intriguing. The extensive research speaks for the “Jugaad” done by the authors in getting this master piece together. The research doesn’t end with the book though – the authors have created a webpage “www.jugaadinnovation.com” where they talk of more “Jugaad” ideas, videos and interviews of some of these innovators.

The book is a must read for every budding entrepreneur, academicians, corporate managers, CEOs, R&D teams, consultants and students irrespective of their discipline.


The book will be a hot property, if only it is priced “frugally”.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Dr Umar Farooq Patel15 May 2014 at 03:45

    Hindustan Times shows how Low-Cost JUGAAD Innovative solutions can help to unclog traffic on Mumbai's major junctions. Thank you for HT for the initiative.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Vital Few: Why 80:20 Quietly Runs (Almost) Everything We Do

Sometime in the late 1890s, an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto was, so the story goes, pottering about in his garden when he noticed something odd. A handful of pea pods were yielding the bulk of his peas, while the majority of the plants were, frankly, freeloaders. Whether the peas were the real trigger or merely a nice anecdote that grew in the retelling, what Pareto did document rigorously was far more consequential. Roughly 80 per cent of the land in Italy, he found, was owned by about 20 per cent of the population. He then looked and found the same lopsidedness in wealth distribution in other countries and centuries. The rich were few, and the wealth was concentrated. For decades, this remained little more than a footnote in economics. It took a quality-management engineer, Joseph Juran, to lift the observation out of the ledger books and turn it into a rule of thumb for everything. Juran christened it the "Pareto Principle" and gave us that lovely phrase, the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cathedral Thinking: Building for a Skyline You Won't See

On cathedral thinking: building for a skyline you won't see, and why it is at once the most tempting instinct in a strategy or a statute and the easiest one to fake. When Natarajan Chandrasekaran announced he would step down as Chairman of Tata Sons, the business papers reached, almost by reflex, for a phrase he had made his own: Cathedral Thinking . Chandra, as he is popularly known, did not coin the term. He borrowed it from philosopher Roman Krznaric, who uses it to summon the medieval masons of Europe, the ones who cut the first stones for cathedrals they knew they would never see finished. They were building for strangers. For descendants they would never meet. Leave the boardroom there, as this write-up is not about the developments at Tata Sons. It is about the phrase, which is far too useful to belong to any one chairman. Cathedral thinking is one of the most attractive instincts in public life, and one of the easiest to counterfeit. The trouble is that the counterfeit look...
Post a Comment
Read more

LICs Investments in ITC: A watershed moment for ESG investments in India?

It was only last month when I was approached by a magazine for financial planners to write an article for them. One of the subjects that I proposed was writing a series of articles on Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) issues in financial investment decision making. They politely refused citing that their readers will not be interested in something like this as it doesn't concern their clients directly. While I completely respect their decision, but I personally feel it may be the right time that we start evaluating ESG implications of our financial decisions. The recent Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed in the Bombay High Court brings out the ESG debate into mainstream. The PIL against the Union government, Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) and five public sector companies, Life Insurance Corporation (LIC), General Insurance Corporation (GIC), New India Assurance, National Insurance Company and Specified Undertaking of Unit Trust of India (SUUT...
9 comments
Read more