Most exciting and challenging new innovation book so far this year is Jugaad Innovation*. I was introduced to it by a young researcher at the Big Innovation Centre, Prateek Sureka. I facilitated a strategic workshop for the BIC team at Hertford College in Oxford last week.
Jugaad is a Hindi word that means something like “clever, frugal innovation”. It’s the reverse of the process-driven, rule-bound, dollar-driven innovation approach that has been steadily adopted by Western companies in recent years – an approach that has done more to strangle good new ideas at birth than to liberate the creative forces of growth.
I particularly enjoyed the authors’ description of the way that Six Sigma had gradually strangled innovation at 3M, and how the new CEO eventually set them free again by the suppression of Six Sigma and the re-introduction of 3M’s venerable, powerful (and empowering) 15% rule.
Jugaad is an approach embraced in resource-poor communities – especially in India, of course. It has six main principles:
Seek opportunity in adversity
Do more with less
Think and act flexibly
Keep it simple
Include the margin
Follow your heart
What an opportunity it presents to a range of Western mega-corporations who seek to spend their way to innovation success – not least Microsoft, who are reported as having invested $9 billion a year on R&D, but with rather paltry outcomes.
*Jugaad Innovation: think frugal, be flexible, generate breakthrough growth by Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu and Simone Ahuja, Foreword by Kevin Roberts. Jossey-Bass, 2012
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