Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations. Dr. Simone Ahuja is the principal of Blood Orange, a marketing and strategy advisory boutique with digital media capabilities, and special expertise in innovation. Headquartered in Minneapolis with teams in Mumbai, Blood Orange uses an agile and cost efficient content production framework built upon principles learned through extensive work in India, including "jugaad". Simone recently developed and produced the television series, Indique--Big Ideas from Emerging India for which she explored how innovation within India drives socio-economic development. The series was created based on extensive on the ground research and academic research conducted in partnership with the Centre for India & Global Business at the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School. This research, along with her personal experience in leveraging the complementary skill sets of transnational teams, and meetings with CEOs of multinational corporations as well as grassroots entrepreneurs heralding bottom-up, small scale innovation gave her a holistic, on-the-ground look at the methods and mindset of innovation employed in emerging markets, and its relevance in a global context. Simone has served as an advisor to the Centre for India & Global Business at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge and as an Associate Fellow for the Asia Society, NYC. She provides advisory services and keynote presentations to trade delegations, academic institutions, and Fortune 100 companies including Pepsi Co, Procter & Gamble, Honeywell, General Mills, ECOLAB, Colgate-Palmolive and Best Buy Corp. She regularly contributes to a Harvard Business Review blog on HBR.org. Her upcoming book, Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth, co-authored with Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu and published by Jossey Bass, is due out in the US in April, 2012. Read more about this author Read less about this author Read more about this author Read less about this author Navi Radjou is an independent scholar, an innovation and leadership advisor, an inspirational keynote speaker, and a bestselling author based in New York. Navi, who describes himself as a “humanistic coach with an ecological soul”, has advised hundreds of business leaders worldwide on both their inner development and corporate high-growth strategies. Since 2021, Navi has been ranked by Thinkers50 as one of the 50 most influential management thinkers in the world. Drawing on his Indian upbringing, he was the first (with his co-authors) to capture the phenomenon of jugaad—a Hindi word for improvised solutions born out of ingenuity in resource-constrained settings. Jugaad is our innate “MacGyver spirit”. Building on his global bestseller Jugaad Innovation (over 200,000 copies sold worldwide), Navi has helped hundreds of companies and entrepreneurs unleash and harness the grassroots ingenuity of employees, customers, and partners to co-create simple but effective solutions that deliver greater socio-economic and ecological value using minimum resources. Throughout the three decades of his international career—spanning the public sector to market research and then as an academic and author—Navi’s ideas have been shaped by his eclectic cultural background including his Indian roots, his French education, his cross-industry work experience in the US, Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Navi’s upcoming book, The Frugal Economy: Building a Better World with Less, published by Wiley and Thinkers50 in October 2024, chronicles the rise of a new multi-trillion-dollar economy fueled by 3 mega-trends—business-to-business (B2B) sharing, distributed manufacturing and hyper-local value chains, and regenerative business principles. Using +100 examples and proven best practices, this inspiring book shows business leaders how to reinvent their organization to thrive in the rapidly-emerging frugal economy. Navi is also co-author of From Smart To Wise: Acting and Leading With Wisdom, a book that shows how managers can hone their leadership skills to thrive in the age of smart AI and robots and lead purpose-driven organizations that appeal to Generations Y and Z workers. Navi’s other co-authored book Frugal Innovation: How To Do More With Less was published by The Economist with a foreword by Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever. Previously, Navi served as Executive Director of the Centre for India & Global Business at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He was also a longtime VP/analyst at Forrester Research in Boston and San Francisco and advised senior executives worldwide on breakthrough growth strategies. Navi has consulted with leading international firms—including E&Y, GM, Fujitsu, IBM, Microsoft, P&G, SAP, and TCS. He has served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Innovation & Entrepreneurship. His work has been featured on NPR, BBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Financial Times, Fast Company, and the World Economic Forum’s Agenda. He has written for Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and strategy+business. A widely sought-after inspirational keynote speaker, Navi has addressed audiences across the world in venues like the World Economic Forum, Council on Foreign Relations, Harvard, & MIT. Born and raised in Pondicherry, India, Navi holds dual French-American citizenship. He studied at Ecole Centrale Paris and Yale School of Management. He lives in New York. He is a lifelong student of Yoga, Ayurveda, Qigong, and Buddhist (Vipassana) meditation. Read more about this author Read less about this author Read more about this author Read less about this author Additional authors: Jaideep Prabhu Simone Ahuja author Navi Radjou author Jaideep Prabhu author