Jugaad, or the Indian way of innovation and of creating a flexible solution to problems, is the right path to economic growth, says Indian-born Prof. Jaideep Prabhu, who is the director of Centre for India & Global Business at the Cambridge Univer-sity’s Judge Business School.
Prof. Prabhu, who has co-authored newly-published Jugaad Innovation with Navi Radjou and Simone Ahuja, believes that the Western structured approach to innovation is being slowly replaced by a frugal and flexible version, which is bottom up and emerging from grassroots.
“Innovation, or jugaad, in India is very frugal. You are trying to get most out of limited resources. Indians are very good at that. It is very flexible and not planned. It is improvised,” says Prof. Prabhu, who in 2008 was appointed the first Jawaharlal Nehru professor at the University of Cambridge.
“Innovation has long been seen as a product of the West, driven by the corporations and the government departments, kept close to the headquarters for strategic advantage,” he says. “The academic literature on where you locate R&D is very clear that you can outsource and offshore anything from manufacturing to back office like the West did with China and then India, but research and development stays close to home and to the headquarters.”
“In the West, innovation is driven by corporations, in R&D departments you have people who are scientists and engineers who are working on R&D in a formal, planned and expensive manner, which is very secretive,” he explains.
“In contrast, if you look at India, innovation is everywhere. Everybody is doing it. It’s part of life. It’s jugaad. Everybody is trying to fix something. Everybody is trying to fix with limited means the problems that they have. Everyone from farmers, social entrepreneurs, to consumers is doing it and not just the corporations.
“The principles of structured innovation — expensive, planned, insular and top down — are totally opposite in the developing economies like India. There innovation is frugal, unplanned or improvised, democratic and bottom up.”
This approach to innovation may be different, but it is also being practised in the West, not just in India, Brazil, China and parts of Africa, like Kenya, says Prof. Prabhu.
“In the United States, it is called DIY. There is a DIY movement there,” he says, adding that even in the West, jugaad innovation is driven by resource constraint and unpredictable environment.
Admitting that the concept of jugaad has a negative connotation, Prof. Prabhu says, “It is cutting corners, it is shoddy, it is sometimes illegal, it goes through back channels. But at the same time there is something positive about jugaad. There is positive ingenuity. We have chosen to focus on the positive of jugaad. We accept the negative connotation, but move on to the positive aspect of jugaad as it drives innovation and is driven by an innovative spirit.”
The systematic approach to innovation has to continue in parallel with jugaad innovation, says Prof. Prabhu.
“We think that jugaad could be a complement and not a substitute to structured R&D. For innovation, you need both the structured and the jugaad approach. In the initial stages, jugaad is interesting for coming up with ideas, but the systematic approach can help to scale it up.”
Prof. Prabhu and his co-authors have come up with six principles underlying jugaad innovation, including “follow your heart,” explaining that the courage of following a dream or passion is what drives innovation.