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...

To compete with the dawning age of Scarcity corporate leaders will have to make some necessary changes in the way they think, the way their management thinks and the way their systems work. Some of the necessary steps that the leaders can take could be as mentioned. Tie Senior Management’s Compensation to Frugal Performance The senior management’s compensation should be linked to how frugal they can think. Florida Ice & Farm Co., a large food and beverage producer and distributor in Costa Rica developed and set the Balanced Scorecard to track how the company was reducing its consumption of natural resources. R&D Should be Challenged to Do More with Less To keep the huge R&D funding in control and to make sure that the engineers are not over doing it, it is best to budget the R&D and asking it do more with less. After visiting Russia, French carmaker Renault’s CEO Louis Schweitzer challenged his R&D team to make a car which costs less than Euro 6000 as that was...

Corporate leaders can learn from Jugaad Innovators how to turn adversity into advantage and get it to work in their favour. Rather than getting frighten about an upcoming problem, corporate leaders should use the change to work for them and not against them. According to author of “Better Under Pressure” Justin Menkes, when facing crises and challenges, leaders must cultivate a sense of equanimity and demonstrate ‘realistic optimism’. Most of the CEOs these days are afraid of the growing popularity of the social media today. It gives a lot of power in hands of the common man which is not comfortable for big brands. They fret about how social media tools, when placed in the wrong hands, can be used to spread false rumours, damage a brand name, and ruin corporate and personal reputations within hours. Rather than fearing from this companies like Procter & Gamble demonstrated how voice of the masses can be used for research and development. In the past, when developing new produ...