jugaad . more than just 'frugal innovation'

In our world of material wealth, we forget that most of the world fixes everything and discards nothing. 
 — Stephen Jay Gould 

The first camera I got was an  umpteenth hand Yashica Penta J. It was moody piece of machinery when I got from a pawn shop. It must have been hawked in by a wandering Hippy who knew about its moods and  never came back to collect it.     

That camera got a new lease of life when I reached Delhi. The local repairmen worked their magical jugaad  and kept  the camera  working. 

Delhi's wonderous camera repairers were real jugaadus. Without any access to spare parts  or repair manuals  they kept the Delhi photographers and their ancient cameras, clicking.    

The Indian Government, in those days, considered Photography to be a Luxury  and did not allow the import of cameras or even their spare parts. 

 The jugaadu repairmen were a dire necessity  and their inventiveness meant that no cameras ever landed up in a landfill. Even the junk among them  were recycled for spare parts that kept other cameras working. 

Jugaad then, is a word and a work ethic I understand and appreciate.  It is something more than just frugal inventiveness. It is an answer to  a consumer society based on the idea of built in obsolescence . 







Indians have a word for such startling ingenuity in the face of adversity. It’s called jugaad(pronounced joo-gar), a colloquial Hindi term that roughly means “doing more with less.” 



Indians may be the world’s champions when it comes to improvising with whatever falls to hand. Even Hindu mythology is replete with examples. The powerful god Shiva lopped off the head of his son Ganesh as he stood guard while his mother, Parvati, was taking a bath. Angered by her husband’s action, Parvati demanded restitution; upon which Shiva simply severed the head of a nearby elephant and installed it on Ganesh’s shoulders. In true jugaad fashion, the power of the much-beloved elephant god is invoked as the remover of obstacles.




And threads of jugaad still run through the fabric of ordinary life in wealthy European countries, although their frugal origins may have been long obscured. In a beautiful essay titled "God Is in the Crumbs," the French historian Dominque Predali points out that in the middle ages cloistered nuns and monks, motivated by the potent threat of eternal damnation, became masters of reworking leftover food into tasty meals. They regarded food as a gift from God, and so wasting it — especially bread, which Predali observes was imbued with "symbolic values" — was a sin. "According to a German legend," Predali writes, "the devil collected any crumbs that fell from the table, turned them into burning coals, and threw them at sinner roasting in hell." So, after each meal, the nuns and monks dutifully swept crumbs from the table into a basket and used them in a hot soup for the Saturday evening meal or a pudding for the poor. "To this day," he adds, "in monasteries and the lay world alike, stale bread is not wasted and instead is used to make the sweet fried pancake that the French call pain perdu and the Spanish torrijas de Santa Teresa."




To be sure, the celebration of this very pragmatism — the cheerleading of improvised, situational solutions — has provoked criticism. As Philip McClellan, Asia editor for theInternational Herald Tribune, writes: “For some in India, jugaad represents the best of India — the ability of an enterprising people to make do with less. For others, it represents shoddy products and shady practices for which the country has long been known, and a fatalistic acceptance of that reality.” Other critics argue that raising jugaad to a national virtue is a symptom of neoliberal economics and the privatization of public responsibility. To laud the poor for their "adaptive capacity," writes Oxford professor of geography Craig Jeffrey in The Guardian, is in effect to suggest that if “barefoot entrepreneurs” are able to "'pull themselves up by their own bootstraps' there is little need for the state to wade in with things like effective training, cheap credit, and a decent public infrastructure.” 

In this view, jugaad thinking encourages the dangerous idea that poverty is caused by little more than an individual lack of imagination rather than by the systemic failure of a corruption-ridden government to assume responsibility for reforming the criminal justice system; providing decent sanitation, clean air and potable water; promoting gender parity and economic fairness (not to mention constructing barrier-free public spaces that are universally accessible regardless of physical ability). This is a serious and valid position. Still, I believe jugaad has the potential — maybe our best shot yet — to articulate and frame a global philosophy for sustainable innovation. Given that many fads fade as soon as they begin to fly, particularly in the restless business world, I want to argue that the tenets and practice of jugaad are likely to serve us well over the long haul, and that they deserve a permanent place in our innovation lexicon. 




Whether it’s lithium, phosphorus, freshwater, platinum, chromium, petroleum or topsoil, “the world is entering an era of pervasive, unprecedented resource scarcity,” writes Klare in The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources. [6] As the easily accessible supplies of the planet’s natural resources are tapped out, we will be forced to dig deeper or go further afield into more remote, risky, politically volatile and environmentally sensitive places. Already, advances in technologies are making possible extraction dreams in places as extreme as the deep sea. China, to note one powerful example, is teaming up with private prospecting companies to map vast stretches of the ocean floor, filing claims to mineral rights in territories the size of Puerto Rico. They’re motivated, writes New York Timesreporter William J. Broad, “by dwindling resources on land as well as record prices for gold and other metals” in terrestrial deposits. 

But there are alternatives, and here jugaad might play a crucial role. “Instead of rushing to extract whatever remains of the earth’s vital resources,” Klare advises, “major political and corporate powers could engage in a race to adapt: a contest to become among the first to adopt new materials, methods, and devices that will free the world from its dependence on finite resource supplies. Such a race would be motivated by the realization that, sooner or later, all countries will be forced to adjust to a life of extreme resource scarcity — and that whoever can make this transition early will reap significant advantages.”  








Top: Jaipur Foot prosthetics. [Photo via Women's News Network] Middle: Mitticool, a clay refrigerator passively cooled by water. [Photo via Little Design Book] Bottom: Dr. Girish Khurana, with a GE MAC 400 electrocardiogram machine. [Photo via MedNet]

The implications are sobering. For wealthy countries, scarcity will become the new normal. For countries such as India, scarcity will be, well, just plain normal. Which might mean that the future laboratories in the race to adapt, if measured by the greatest gains in quality of life for the greatest number of people, may be located not in places like Silicon Valley or Silicon Fen. They might instead be found in Jaipur, in north India, where Jaipur Foot has been fitting supremely functional and affordable ($45 vs. $12,000 in the U.S.) prostheses for amputees since 1975. Or in the Indian village of Ramakrishna Nagar, where entrepreneur Mansukh Prajapati has invented the Mitticool, a clay refrigerator that is passively cooled by water. “Prajapati doesn’t work for NASA or Whirlpool, and he doesn’t have a Ph.D. in quantum physics or an MBA from Stanford,” write the authors of Jugaad Innovation. “In fact, he didn’t even finish high school. His R&D lab — a simple open-air room with clay in various shapes and forms arrayed on the floor and an oven tucked away in the corner —is a far cry from the sprawling campuses of GE and Whirlpool, which swarm with hundreds of engineers and scientists.” Nonetheless, Mitticool stands to have a beneficial impact all out of proportion to its humble, decidedly low-tech origins. Again, the authors of Jugaad Innovation: “Over five hundred million Indians live without reliable electricity, including most of the people in Prajapati’s village. The positive health and lifestyle benefits of owning a fridge in a desert village where fruit, vegetables, and dairy are available only intermittently would be tremendous.” 

Mitticool may not come to an appliance store near you any time soon (though, as I write, I long to replace the distracting growl of my Amana fridge with a device that cools food in silence). But other designs, conceived in resource-constrained conditions, are beginning to migrate into world markets. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, professors of business at Dartmouth, call this economic transposition “reverse innovation.” In the past, they write, innovations typically arose “in rich countries and later flowed downhill to the developing world. Quite simply, a reverse innovation is any innovation that is adopted first in the developing world. Surprisingly, often, these innovations defy gravity and flow uphill.” 





In the race-to-adapt era, resource-constrained countries like India may thus have a competitive edge. Not only do they come to the product-development process with nonnegotiable but arguably useful limits; they also have a ready-made societal context or infrastructure in which frugal innovations can endure. Navi Radjou, a Palo Alto-based innovation consultant and one of the authors of Jugaad Innovation, points out that during his childhood in India, “we never threw anything away. Everything got recycled. If a plastic bucket was slightly broken, we’d try to fix it. There was a whole jugaad industry which helped us reuse everything we had.” 



 Even Indian cuisine seems vigilant about exploiting scarcity. Architect Anita Dake, one of our host’s friends, surmised, only half-jokingly, that roti, a soft Indian flatbread, was likely invented to reduce waste. It’s used to mop up leftover food bits and sauces from one’s plate, so by the time it hits the sink, the plate requires less water for a final cleaning. 




Or maybe simply the kind of person who can help train the next generation in the art of jugaad: the capacity to live frugally — yet richly — in the coming age of limits. 



http://places.designobserver.com/feature/frugal-innovation/37595/