Jugaad Innovation - Jugaad King

Breaking down internal silos is critical when you are trying to quickly bring to market brilliant ideas from external sources. Few companies who have understood the importance are given below with their stories: Facebook Facebook knows this, although its subscriber base has grown to more than 80 crore users, the company still employs only about 35 designers, using a flat organizational structure. Soleio Cuervo, the second designer that Facebook CEO Mark Zucherberg hired in 2005, says “When I started, it was only a handful of product designers. Now, engineers work with us directly. We don’t throw documents at them with specs. We all focus on the site’s user experience versus the code. SAP Labs Similarly V.R. Ferose, Managing Director of SAP Labs India has set up ‘AppHaus’. An open space within the campus where designers, engineers and marketers work collaboratively & intensively on new products. Recently a small 10 member team worked around the clock in the AppHaus using limit

Jugaad Innovators do not reinvent, they improvise. There are some simple methods that can be implemented to enhance improvement at regular stages. Improving on regular basis will ensure that the need never arises of reinventing. Some of these methods are given below and explained briefly. Break Rules and Shift Values When Necessary In July 2003, IBM’s then CEO Sam Palmisano organized a ‘Value Jam’. A three day long online brainstorming session in which all employees were invited to renew and update IBM’s century-old value system. This collaborative exercise re-contextualized the very notion of innovation and IBM’s core values. Such activities ensure that there is always innovation happening within the company, not just product ideas but cultural and working environment wise too. Don’t Let Inflexible Investors and Customers Dictate Your Innovation Agenda Henry Ford, founder of Ford motors said “If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster hors

Being flexible and coming up with new business models is increasingly critical for firms. However, many companies continue to operate their businesses in the ways they had been operated till now.  There are mainly 5 reasons why it is difficult for a large firm to adapt the flexibility model. There reasons are given below and explained. Complacency According to Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, individuals typically have one of two mindsets: A fixed Mindset – They believe their qualities and other’s are carved in stone A Growth Mindset – They believe that their basic qualities can be nurtured and improved through efforts. Shashank Samant, President of GlobalLogic, a company that provide R&D services to large technology vendors was invited by a large firm to redesign their 15 year old product. Samant and the team at GlobalLogic made a simple but efficient design keeping in mind the audience that prefers using Google and Facebook. The pre

In times like these it is very important for a company to initially survive and then grow. Jugaad Innovators know this fact very well and act accordingly. There are four crucial ways in which they think and act flexibly in response to the environment they face. Think the Unthinkable Harish Hande dared to think the unthinkable and succeeded. Hande founded India’s Solar Electric Light Company (SELCO) in 1995. He started his business with very little seed money, as conservative banks were not ready to invest in an unproven business model in an unknown industry. He started with investing his own money, Rs. 1500 to be specific. However he soon hit the wall, he soon learnt that many of his potential consumers earn less than Rs. 50 a day and could not afford an upfront payment that was required. Even if these systems somehow got installed, there was no economic way for him to maintain them for rural consumers scattered across multiple villages. To overcome these twin problems,

Jugaad innovation is definitely on top at PepsiCo. Given that the macroeconomic environment in a constant state of change, PepsiCo must be ready to refresh and diversify its products to meet the needs of a dynamic marketplace. To fight the problems at hand, PepsiCo has defined 4 planks of sustainability, namely,    Financial Performance,  Human Sustainability,   Environmental Sustainability and  Talent Sustainability Financial Performance PepsiCo established a Global Value Innovation Centre in India in late 2010. Rather than reinventing the wheel, this centre partners with Jugaad innovators worldwide to solve problems of manufacturing and distribution processes. A bottom up approach is used to deal with scarcity. Human Sustainability PepsiCo has focused a lot over the three main types of products, the ‘fun-for-you’ (Pepsi and Lay’s), better-for-you (zero-calorie Pepsi Max and Propel Zero) and the ‘good-for-you’ (Quaker and Tropicana). To hone PepsiCo’s focus on nutriti