Thinkers/Thinkers 50: Know what 'Jugaad' or frugal innovation has done for the world!
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Take Kanak Das, a young man who lives in Morigaon, a remote village in the northeast Indian state of Assam. Das got sick of riding his bicycle on poor village roads filled with potholes and bumps. Assume you were an R&D engineer who works for
Das literally transformed adversity into an opportunity to innovate and extract value from the very problem he confronted. Das epitomizes the spirit of jugaad. Jugaad is a hindi word meaning an innovative fix or an improvised solution born from ingenuity and cleverness. Jugaad is, quite simply, a unique way of thinking and acting in response to challenges; it is the gutsy art of spotting opportunities in the most adverse circumstances and resourcefully improvising solutions using simple means. Jugaad is about seeing the glass always half-full.
Jugaad Innovators: The Modern Day Alchemists
Jugaad is practised by almost all Indians in their daily lives to make the most of what they have. Jugaad applications include finding new shrewd uses for everyday objects—Indian kitchens are replete with empty soft drink or pickle bottles reused as containers for water, spices, or lentils— or inventing new utilitarian applications and ingenious solutions with everyday objects, like using cellphones to make “missed calls”.
The entrepreneurial spirit of jugaad is not limited to India. It is widely practised across all emerging economies such as China,
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The jugaad innovators we studied all hail from different cultures and social and professional backgrounds. Yet they all share one unique quality: their uncanny ability to “make lemonade with any lemon” they are given. They are resilient entrepreneurs who overcame tremendous difficulties to invent ingenious solutions to vexing issues afflicting our societies. Like magicians, they conjured up these innovative solutions out of thin air—using meagre resources. Just as an alchemist can convert low-value metal into high-value gold, these frugal innovators can “do more with less”: they can create lot more value using far fewer resources.
What Makes Jugaad innovators— And Their solutions—Unique?
Despite their diversity, all the jugaad innovators—be they entrepreneurs or corporate leaders—we studied in India and other emerging markets all have the following unique personality traits in common:
They are empathetic
They recognize that their fellow citizens are suffering from adverse circumstances (e.g., poor access to healthcare or education services) and strive to lessen their pain. It is this compassion for other beings that sparks their own passion to discovering pertinent solutions to issues afflicting others.
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For instance, Jane Chen, a Stanford MBA, was deeply moved by the fact that 20 million babies are born prematurely or with a low birth weight each year worldwide, and four million of them die, most in developing nations, because their parents can’t afford to maintain them in baby incubators, which are too expensive. To address this issue, Jane co-founded Embrace, which makes inexpensive portable infant warmers that low income mothers in rural India, China, and Africa can use to keep their premature babies warm, and thus save their lives.
They are driven by a higher purpose
Jugaad innovators are not driven by fame or money. Rather, they are motivated by the aspiration to build “a better world”. This higher purpose provides them great ethical clarity and serves as an inner compass that guides all their decisions and actions.
For instance, brothers
They are nonconformists
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Jugaad innovators boldly challenge the status quo by relentlessly posing the question: “why not?” They exhibit what Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls “uncommon common sense”: they develop counterintuitive solutions that flout conventional wisdom or even turn it on its head.
For example, when
They are ingeniously resourceful
Just like MacGyver (the famed TV action hero who can escape from any predicament by improvising solutions using just his Swiss Army knife), jugaad innovators display great ingenuity in the face of challenges. They leverage their (inner) resourcefulness when they have no external resources to tap into. They embody the frugal “bricoleurs” whom the legendary anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss lauded in his seminal book La Pensée Sauvage. According to Lévi-Strauss, a bricoleur taps into existing resources to quickly solve a problem—unlike an engineer who goes searching for the best resources available to design a perfect solution.
Mansukh Prajapati is one such bricoleur: a potter by training, he created Mitticool, the world’s “greenest” fridge made entirely of clay that consumes no electricity and is 100% biodegradable.
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They are adaptable
Jugaad innovators possess an agile mindset that enables them to rapidly shift course and reach their objectives by trying out various approaches. They are not wedded to any specific approach or tool to solving problems. Their sense of purpose is steadfast (“make the world a better place”) but their method to serving that purpose is dynamic and constantly evolving. Hence, they are resilient and can “reinvent” themselves continually.
For example, Harish Hande founded Selco in 1995 to debunk the myths that poor people can’t afford
These personality traits of jugaad innovators also pervade the clever solutions they conceive. All their astute solutions (products or services) share the following attributes:
• They deliver more value at less cost: Their ingenious solutions are low-cost (or much less expensive than alternative solutions in the market) and yet they offer much greater value for users. As a result, these solutions deliver “more value for less”. For instance, the embrace portable infant warmer costs less than $200—or 1% of the cost of western baby incubators priced at $20,000. More importantly, mothers can now hold against them their premature babies— dramatically boosting their chances of survival. That’s real value!
• They are simple to use and maintain: The solutions are designed to be incredibly simple to use and maintain, thus lowering their “adoption barriers” for a larger number of users. For example, Eko’s mobile banking and payment services can be accessed using even the most basic mobile handset. This ease of use is a key success factor of Eko’s service which today counts 2 million clients.
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• They are inclusive: The solutions make critical products and services available and accessible to “marginal segments” of the society—e.g., low income people, the elderly, ethnic minorities— who traditionally couldn’t afford or access these products/services due their high cost or high complexity. For example, Selco’s solar lighting systems are now used by over 125,000 rural households across India (Selco aims to serve 200,00 households by 2013).
• They are sustainable: The solutions are both environmentally and socially sustainable. First, these solutions are eco-friendly and minimize use of natural resources. Second, these solutions contribute to the social sustainability of local communities by spawning new “ecosystems” that create new jobs, etc.—thus catalysing a virtuous cycle of enduring socio-economic growth. For instance, Mansukh Prajapati involves many women in his village in Gujarat to produce his Mitticools, thus creating gainful employment for local community members.
The rise of Jugaad innovation in The West The developed world, like emerging economies, is increasingly facing its own problems in areas such as healthcare, education, finance, and community development. Cash-strapped western governments, however, are unable to deal with these challenges on their own. In this context, a new wave of flexible-minded jugaad innovators in the US and Europe are emerging. These nonconformists are turning the conventional practices of many industries upside down, and in the process creating affordable and sustainable products and services for more citizens.
For instance, Sal Khan founded Khan Academy to democratize access to education and make learning more fun for kids. He has created over 4,000 video tutorials for math, sciences, and engineering that are freely available on
Universities too are joining this jugaad innovation movement in the west. Several higher education institutions in the US and Europe are training a new breed of engineers and managers to design next-generation products and services that can deal with scarcity in a frugal and sustainable manner. For instance, Stanford runs a very popular multidisciplinary program called entrepreneurial design for Extreme Affordability. And
Ultimately, the ingenious solutions devised by these audacious jugaad innovators—our modern day alchemists—in emerging markets as well as in developed economies stand out not because they are “clever” but because they bring hope to millions around the world. In today’s morose economic climate and challenging social context, these alchemists help transmute pessimism into optimism—and that, by itself, is priceless. These ingenious alchemists—and their frugal and agile jugaad mindset—not only represent the hope for humanity but they also help restore our faith in humanity.
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This article is partially adapted from the book Jugaad Innovation: A Frugal And Flexible Approach To Innovation For The 21st Century (
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