Dinesh C. Sharma is a New Delhi-based award-winning journalist and author with over thirty-five years’ of professional experience. He has written extensively on science and technology, climate change, health, environment and innovation for national and international media, including The Lancet and Wired. He has been Science Editor at Mail Today, and Managing Editor at India Science Wire and is currently the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow (2020-2021). His book The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution was awarded the Computer History Museum Book Prize in 2016. He has also been a visiting faculty at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Ateneo de Manila University, Manila. Dinesh Sharma tweets at @dineshcsharma
"Jugaad Innovation is the most comprehensive book yet to appear on the subject [of frugal innovation]." —The Economist A frugal and flexible approach to innovation for the 21st century Innovation is a key directive at companies worldwide. But in these tough times, we can't rely on the old formula that has sustained innovation efforts for decades—expensive R&D projects and highly-structured innovation processes. Jugaad Innovation argues the West must look to places like India, Brazil, and China for a new approach to frugal and flexible innovation. The authors show how in these emerging markets, jugaad (a Hindi word meaning an improvised solution born from ingenuity and cleverness) is leading to dramatic growth and how Western companies can adopt jugaad innovation to succeed in our hypercompetitive world. Outlines the six principles of jugaad innovation: Seek opportunity in adversity, do more with less, think and act flexibly, keep it simple, include the margin, and follow your heart Features twenty case studies on large corporations from around the world—Google, Facebook, 3M, Apple, Best Buy, GE, IBM, Nokia, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, Tata Group, and more—that are actively practicing jugaad innovation The authors blog regularly at Harvard Business Review; their work has been profiled in BusinessWeek, MIT Sloan Management Review, The Financial Times, The Economist, and more Filled with previously untold and engaging stories of resourceful jugaad innovators and entrepreneurs in emerging markets and the United States This groundbreaking book shows leaders everywhere why the time is right for jugaad to emerge as a powerful business tool in the West—and how to bring jugaad practices to their organizations.
The world of economics and management is being reshaped in more ways than one including rapid advancements in technology and business practices. This book weaves together a diverse set of issues such as consumption patterns, wealth disparities and the management, behaviour and financial health of businesses and consumers to analyse the effectiveness of economic and business strategies. Rapid technological advancements along with the need for cost-effectiveness and convenience are making service providers embrace technology as a partner rather than a tool in their economic journey. Relatedly, traditional management philosophy is coming under a scanner, with an increasing emphasis on holistic development of the organization, rather than a top-down approach, as has been the case in the past. Understanding major developments in economic and financial policymaking has perennially been a key concern of public policy, shaped by recent global and related developments, this has necessitated a relook at these issues, couched in a cross-cutting perspective. Viewed from this standpoint, the present volume, written to honour the rich academic work of the eminent economist Professor Anindya Sen intersects this triad of economics, finance and public policy that are integral to policy thinking and its formulation. The smorgasbord of research ideas, involving both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, presented in this volume, provides useful perspectives on the drivers that are continually reshaping the dynamism in the world around us and, in the process, integrates a multidisciplinary perspective of focusing on several pertinent policy challenges. This book will be useful to researchers and students of economics, finance and public policy, economic theorists, microeconomics, and even to those with a broader canvass such as researchers in macroeconomics, international economics, business, management and marketing.
Rashmi Sadana is Associate Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University and author of English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India.
This book explores the history and metamorphosis of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), the premier business and management schools in India, and their significance within the changing landscape of higher education, nation-building and socio-economic development in the country. Over the past decades, IIMs, as institutions, have recalibrated their goals and priorities to address contemporary challenges in a globalised world, changing aspirations of a rapidly growing population and the changing idea of India. This book examines different facets of the challenges the institutes have faced in the aftermath of independence. These include the challenges of effective institutional governance; ensuring equity and access; democratisation; raising the bar for teaching and research; addressing national imparities and global benchmarking; accreditation and ranking; and academia, industry, and employability. Drawing upon the interplay of the experiential and analytical, the contributors to the volume also engage with the Indian knowledge system and the contested terrain of global theory and research. This volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers and practitioners of education, management studies, academic administration, and policymaking in the field of higher education.
A moral dilemma gripped Professor Gupta when he was invited by the Bangladeshi government to help restructure their agricultural sector in 1985. He noticed how the marginalized farmers were being paid poorly for their otherwise unmatched knowledge. The gross injustice of this constant imbalance led Professor Gupta to found what would turn into a resounding social and ethical movement—the Honey Bee Network—bringing together and elevating thousands of grassroots innovators. For over two decades, Professor Gupta has travelled through rural lands unearthing innovations by the ranks—from the famed Mitti Cool refrigerator to the footbridge of Meghalaya. He insists that to fight the largest and most persistent problems of the world we must eschew expensive research labs and instead, look towards ordinary folk. Innovation—that oft-flung around word—is stripped to its core in this book. Poignant and personal, Grassroots Innovation is an important treatise from a social crusader of our time.
India is known as a country not of innovation but of improvisation-or 'Jugaad', as they say in Hindi. But that has begun to change. We have enough examples in this country of people who have turned industry norms upside down to pull off the impossible in their fields. Eleven such case studies are featured in the book, including: Titan, which came out with the slimmest water-resistant watch in the world; Su-Kam, a power backup company that did not fit into an existing industry but ended up creating a new one; Shantha Biotech, which developed a low-cost Hepatitis-B vaccine and ushered in the biotechnology age in India; Trichy Police, which rewrote policing paradigms to nip extremism and crime in the bud, thus transforming the city. Through the breakthroughs achieved by these organizations, Porus Munshi shows that to do what is considered 'impossible' in your particular industry, you have to be subversive and think differently. In the process, if the existing business model needs to be turned on its head, then so be it!
Exploding growth. Soaring investment. Incoming talent waves. India's top companies are scoring remarkable successes on these fronts - and more. How? Instead of adopting management practices that dominate Western businesses, they're applying fresh practices of their ownin strategy, leadership, talent, and organizational culture. In The India Way, the Wharton School India Team unveils these companies' secrets. Drawing on interviews with leaders of India's largest firms - including Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries, Narayana Murthy of Infosys Technologies, and Vineet Nayar of HCL Technologies - the authors identify what Indian managers do differently, including: Looking beyond stockholders' interests to public mission and national purpose Drawing on improvisation, adaptation, and resilience to overcome endless hurdles Identifying products and services of compelling value to customers Investing in talent and building a stirring culture The authors explain how these innovations work within Indian companies, identifying those likely to remain indigenous and those that can be adapted to the Western context. With its in-depth analysis and research, The India Way offers valuable insights for all managers seeking to strengthen their organization's performance.
In light of growing discourse on 'frugal innovation', this book offers novel approaches to innovation based on extensive empirical research. The study complements a decade of scholarly attention on frugal innovation by taking a research-based approach to innovation in resource-scarce and complex institutional contexts. The findings suggest that concepts such as frugal, reverse, jugaad, social, grassroots and inclusive innovation in fact represent heterogeneous assemblies of innovation for social, environmental and economic value. The conceptual framework invites attention to more plural sources and elements in the study of models of innovation to inspire further research in the fields of strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship, economic sociology and development studies. The design framework offers models, metrics and competencies for practitioners and policymakers to identify, evaluate and design frugal innovations. The comprehensive view of frugal innovation demonstrates how firms can implement globally competitive strategies by pursuing innovation for humanity to improve lives for everyone, everywhere.
