Jugaad Innovation - Jugaad King

This article brings us to the 4th Principle that is, Keep it simple. Dr. Sathya Jeganathan is a pediatrician in Chengalpattu Government Medical College, a rural hospital in South India. She was getting troubled by the low mortality rate of the infants in her hospital. Of each 1000 babies that were born, 39 died in the first four weeks of life. The case was similar across the entire country. Roughly 2.6 crore children were born each year. Out of which 12 lakh died during the 1st month of their birth. The solution was in the west in form of incubators. She tried to import few for her hospital, but the setup itself coasted her lot of money, had high maintenance cost and it required a well trained staff to operate. It was a solution, but for the rich west only. It could not be implemented in the rural India. Undeterred, she tried to do some Jugaad thinking. She decided to design her own incubator, one that was simple, inexpensive and easy to use. She teamed up with neonatal nurses an...

Jugaad innovators are able to get more from less by applying frugality in every activity they perform at every step along the value chain. Their frugality shows up not only when they utilize the natural resources and limited finance, but also when they save time and energy by relaying on their partners to do the work rather than trying to do everything by themselves. Some of the frugal approaches employed by Jugaad innovators to gain more from less are listed and explained below. Reuse and Recombine Rather than creating something entirely new from scratch, Jugaad innovators are more likely to reuse or seek new combinations of existing technologies or resources. Zhongxing Medical, a Chinese medical device maker, borrowed Digital Direct X-ray equipment from its parent company Beijing Aerospace. It was use in everyday application like chest X-rays. Similarly Jugaad innovators in African countries are leveraging existing cellphone networks to devise frugal business models that ...