Indian touch to the world of innovation?
By siliconindia   |   Friday, 04 December 2009, 22:37 IST   |    16 Comments
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Indian touch to the world of innovation?
Bangalore: Its not just the Indian firms, but also the U.S. firms, that are applying the Indian concept of innovation - Jugaad, an improvisational style of innovation that's driven by scarce resources and attention to a customer's immediate needs, not their lifestyle wants. Some of the Indians CEOs carry this unique management trait - the 'jugaad' factor, which is the tendency to resort to an unplanned makeshift in the company. While this can be perceived negatively, it can also be a positive trait because of its inherent inventiveness and survival instinct, reports Business Week. Recession-slammed corporations no longer have money to burn on research and development. Likewise, U.S. consumers are trading down to good-enough products and services. Meantime, the Indian economy continues to plow ahead despite the global recession - it grew at a 7.9 percent clip in the third quarter, suggesting its executives have a winning strategy. Companies as varied as Best Buy, Cisco Systems, and Oracle are employing jugaad as they create products and services that are more economical both for suppliers and consumers. "In today's challenging times, American companies are forced to learn to operate with Plan Bs," notes Navi Radjou, who heads the recently formed Centre for India and Global Business at England's Cambridge University. "But Indian engineers have long known how to invent with a whole alphabet soup of options that work, are cheap, and can be rolled out instantly. That is jugaad." Prasad Kaipa, a former Manager at Apple's in-house training university, uses jugaad in the courses he's teaching at Hyderabad's Indian School of Business. The University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, where Indian-born Professor C.K. Prahalad teaches, has opened a research office near Infosys' headquarters in India so faculty members can observe how Indian software firms come up with ideas. McKinsey consultants have begun talking up jugaad principles with clients, too. Sandeep Vij, Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Systems in Bangalore who heads a new unit that makes energy monitoring systems, says a good example is an Indian villager who constructs a vehicle to transport goats and cattle by turning an irrigation hand pump into a makeshift diesel engine for a wooden cart. Its application also can be seen in Tata Motors' much hyped Nano, sold for the equivalent of $2,500 to so-called bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers who had been priced out of the auto market. "At Tata Group, we're used to thinking like this," says Ananth Krishnan, CTO of Tata Consultancy Services. "The jugaad mindset is crucial. It's not just jargon." U.S. firms recently started putting jugaad into practice. At Best Buy's headquarters, in Minnesota, Kalendu Patel, the retailer's Executive Vice President for emerging business, is holding jugaad workshops to help store personnel and managers come up with new products or services that could be added easily and inexpensively to generate more sales per store. Top executives at Cisco, which opened what the San Jose company calls a second global headquarters in Bangalore in 2007, are importing the Indian mindset as they meld teams of U.S. engineers with Indian supervisors. "The innovation agenda in India is affordability and scale," says Wim Elfrink, Cisco's Chief Globalization Officer, who moved from San Jose to Bangalore in 2007. "People are masters of managing costs down, but not creativity. If Indian engineers find out an executive has an MBA, they will say, unlearn, and observe."

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