Transcription
India ranks 58 on an international Innovation ranking by The Economist intelligence unit, with the top slots taken by Japan, USA, Israel, and Korea. Be it industrial or consumer innovation, we tend to adopt technologies and ideas, or are simply made to do with improvising to fulfill immediate needs. For a nation of over 1 billion that is known to be creative, intelligent, and a growth economy nation with abundant resources, do we have what it takes to steam ahead with life-changing and market-changing ideas? We have begun to pride ourselves in our ability of jugad to the extent that we believe that jugad is the Indian way of innovation. Does it really merit such glory, or is real innovation passing us by due to our lack of systematic and conscious approach to creating world-changing ideas? The opinions are split, and so it is amongst our very polarized panel here. To biff BFF this, we have with us today Padmashri Professor Anil Kumar Gupta from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and always disobey convention Alec Padam, the "go for it man" Ganesh Natrajan, Vice Chairman and CEO, Present Technologies, and of course, the voice of reason man, Justice Sergeant, MD for Consumer at Nielsen India, Mr. Ranjan Malik, Director, Orbit Shifting Innovation Missions, to give us changing paradigms.
Professor Gupta, jugad kills innovation. So tell us, true or not true?
Any culture which celebrates a shortcut approach to learning and innovation is actually doomed. So, anybody, if in India believes that they can emancipate the society to take it to the next level, you mentioned about rankings and all of that, are living in a fool's paradise if they think that jugad approach can take them any further. A makeshfit approach is okay for the concurrent purpose. For that reason, if a plug is not fitting and you put a small matchstick there, that is okay. But is that a good approach, or should we make sure that no plug would require a stick to be put when you put the plug in the holes, you know? But I must also add that some of the authors recently who have used jugad have used it very loosely. For instance, the famous example of Manuk, who designed the clear refrigerator. The authors did not care to understand that there were seven different machines that he had designed. These machines couldn't have happened by tinkering. It is systematic innovation. So the fact that you look at the simplicity of the output and then say, "Oh my God, this is just jugad," is absurd. It is, in some sense, demeans the spirit of the creative people of our country who, with very little resources, are trying to solve so many problems. Perhaps the issue with jugad is also that there are lots of jugad ideas out there which don't get marketed well enough to become to be called innovations.
No, no, no, no, no, no. I refuse to buy that point because the moment you call them jugad type of ideas, you already saying it is tinkering on the margin. You are saying there was some solution available, somebody has just tried to tinker it a little bit, and that's what market.
No, I'm talking about is that jugad, or is there another definition perhaps of jugad? Alec, do you have a definition?
I, boy, no matter how you define it, I don't like it. I don't like the term because it essentially implies a makeshift approach to life. It implies a shortcut approach to life. I think in principle, anybody, anybody who uses a shortcut approach to life is not going to go far. Marketing is a very major challenge. There are a lot of solutions. The bamboo split making machine which can make incense sticks. Vietnam exports about 50,000 tons of incense sticks to India. Yeah. Now, one country is exporting 550,000 tons. We have so much bamboo in Northeast and Central India. These machines can do a great deal. You know, the first fund that NIC is trying to set up, National Innovation Council, of which I'm a member and a rebel at the at the same time. The fund that SIDBI is trying to build up, so-called India Inclusive Fund, actually is India Exclusive Fund. It doesn't deal with any early stage funding. So when you don't have early stage funding, you don't have any support for taking risky. The most risky stages are idea to prototype, proof of concept, proof of concept to prototype, prototype to product, product to equity. At all the early stages, there is no funding available. So the question is, in an ecosystem where there's no funding available for the risky stages of the product cycle, right? You complain about diffusion. Where? Okay.
Professor, so Alec, do you have another definition of innovation or jugad that you might want to add?
Yes. Well, in my definition, jugad is, if you like, by intuition. Intuition can come from many ways. It can come from research. Isaac Newton, all right? He was a great scientist, but observation of an apple falling from a tree was not exactly mind-blowing research. But then he asked the question, why? Why? And I think "why" is the trigger point for all new ideas. Why, or why not? Many ideas that come out of brainstorms, and brainstorms are some as a form of jugad, I believe. You know, when two, three people, four people get together, you can come up with the most amazing ideas. And these ideas, by the way, with good marketing, as you're so right, can create big brands. What I'm saying is idea, and my definition of ideas, and whether you talk call it jugad or you want to call it do it through research or or innovation, whatever, is an idea is I for Innovation, D for Drives, E for Excellence, and A for Action. Innovation that drives excellence and action can come from anywhere. It can come from a caveman sitting rubbing two sticks together and suddenly fire. It's these type of things. Whether you're talking about products which go through innovation through technology, or you're talking about living ideas, it is all to do with ideas. And I don't think ideas should be in any way straight-jacketed by one definition or another.
Ganesh, you, you know, you're in an industry which is very highly led by innovation, and that's been the ace for India as well to put it on the global map. And in all other industries across, we haven't really kept pace with it. But if it wasn't for this industry, and this is also perhaps replicable as we go forward, so it's not going to have the Indian supremacy for too long unless we can move ahead as well. Where do you see this going? Apart from the industry that you're in, if it's not on technology, how can India move forward with this? Taking off from what Alec was saying, there are ideas galore, and we do keep coming up with them. But is the problem on implementation a big one?
See, the minute you say jugad, I think we have this emotional disconnect. Because in the city of Mumbai, we don't like using words like jugad. We want to be professional, etc. But then I did what every IT guy does. I mean, we went into our favorite dictionary called Wikipedia and said, what does Wikipedia talk about when it says jugad? And that gives a very interesting definition, which is a simple way of solving a complex problem by using alternate means. Nothing negative about that discussion. And to go back to what Alec was saying, if there is an alternate method, nothing wrong with that. But it shouldn't take our view or take our eyes away from the long-term cause, which is solving the problem in its entirety. Solve the big problems. But if you look at any corporate journey, you'll find that once in three years, somebody comes up with an absolute breakthrough idea. But do you just wait for the breakthrough idea to happen? You keep encouraging people to be innovative, teams to be innovative, the company to be innovative, and you'll get these multiple incremental innovation ideas. So I'm saying, if you configure jugad to mean that, look, it's a nice way of saying, let's do elegant things simply and find alternate ways, and combine that with long-term issues on innovation governance, etc., I think we'll be more successful. Take the concept that I think Alec talked about, which is what we call crowd-sourcing. Get multiple people, throw up ideas. We should not negate the importance of quick incremental ideas, but at the same time, don't take your eyes against away from big innovation. So I would say it's a combination of both.
But Ranjan, I have a question for you. You've been trying to, trying to, I say, groom a lot of companies, uh, to think beyond the day-to-day kind of operations and get into newer areas and push their boundaries. Don't you see that that's where a little bit of the discord happens? When you are talking about the vision statement of an institution becoming innovation, but the moment you enter working life, we are not very, uh, good at the leadership position allowing people to fail. But we are very okay and accommodating with the implementation levels being very mediocre. So how can we ever become a nation that innovates if we're going to be so forgiving towards failures?
Okay, so, um, um, see, all innovations are human endeavor stories. An individual that sees an extraordinary dream and pursues it with extraordinary focus achieves a breakthrough. So does an organization. So that's where vision and mission and an amazing aspiration really stand. So let me connect that with our topic, which is, you know, jugad. And I, and I do have a point of view on that. You know, I think somewhere the way we use the word jugad in a very colloquial sense is a very, it makes jugad look very cavalier, very casual. I think somewhere, for me, jugad is, and I'll connect it up with the leadership team and the implementation bit that you said, is native ingenuity that leads to eminently workable ideas within your means, within the given means. Now, if you look at it that way, I think what jugad does very interestingly is, it helps you get much, much more out of much, much less. Now, if you look at it that way, again, you know, spoken very in a very tactical manner, you can use it at a very operations level and say, you know, that's a fix someone came up with. But if you want to really understand the essence of jugad in its real sense, I think we'll need to understand this concept called emergence. Look at a system, and now a system evolves because every entity wants to evolve and therefore performs those really ingenious experiments day to day to evolve. And surely, every entity operates out of self-interest. And when every entity evolves, the system evolves too. And we all understand how systems work. You know, the sum of parts is bigger than, um, some, some is bigger than the parts. That's where jugad, I think jugad being a very systemic concept, it's very unfair to look at every activity, ingenious activity that happens in a society and say, is it good enough, or is it just a fix? I think it's a, it's a very profound concept. Most organizations are used to very simplistic processes of innovation, which are very linear, and two, they assume unlimited resources. Usually. And where jugad works is, jugad doesn't assume unlimited resources. It says, this is all that we have, and we have to find a very elegant solution within that.
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Jugad in India, particularly, comes out of the lack of means. Okay? So we have to make do with what we have, and therefore jugad kind of emanates from that. But on the other hand, where organizations are spending money on their R&Ds, why can't the two come together? And why can't organizations shift their focus from looking at spending tons of money into their R&D to develop new products which are perhaps disconnected with the rest of the market, but look at jugad ideas lying out there somewhere, pick up and make commercial sense out of it? Jugads are those really charming, cheeky, quick and dirty solutions that are lying out there that we can get inspired by, pick up, and actually reintroduce them in a very strategic manner and scale them up. I think they're all lying there to inspire us. I think that's where Professor Anil Gupta comes in, where, where his show, the, in fact, he has a, he has a whole encyclopedia of ideas lying there waiting to be picked up and scaled up. This approach which makes you adjust, adapt, and assimilate in efficiency of a system is what it is. Jugad. I want our country to come out of this approach where you, instead of transcending the problem, you learn to adapt and adjust to them. Because the more accommodation you create in your mind for those inefficient things, ways of doing things, the less spark that you get, less energy that you get, less enthusiasm that you get for trying to find a breakthrough solution.
Why are we only to? Are you talking only about technology? Technological improv?
I'm talking about things outside technology and science. If I tell you about education, there was an officer in Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh coastal area. But I won't call it jugad. What he did, he found that the fishermen went to the sea with their children, and children were therefore out of the school. This officer was very concerned because children will not get education, they will remain only unskilled workers, they will never improve their life. So he came out with a beautiful idea. He said, all right, in future, there will be an additional boat which will go with the fisherman. In this boat, the teacher will teach in the daytime. Children will move to the learning boat. In the nighttime, the children will move to the living boat. Great idea. Is it jugad? No. It required some imagination. It required some empathy. It required some compassion. It required some concern. And then he came out with the idea, why won't we have such learning boats all around in the coastal areas? We don't have now. Why don't we celebrate this idea? It's a beautiful idea. Somebody has thought through a problem, come out with a simple solution. I don't mind simplicity, please understand. I don't mind simplicity, but I don't want to bracket that simplicity as something trivial.
Justin, you've worked in different continents and you've seen how things happen. And you know, in the last few years, the economies of various countries have really dipped, and the approach to this dip in economy has been very different in the West and here, particularly coming to, let's say, product innovation. Okay? So what is it that's different out here and there?
I mean, first of all, let me say that, you know, when I came to India two years ago, I'd never heard of the word jugad. It was, it was novel for me. First time I actually heard it was a week after being here when the power went out in my apartment, and that was a problem because I'd set up a fish tank, lots of tropical fish. For those of you that keep fish, they last a day without electricity. So in a panic, I rang the office, said, look, I need to get the power back on. They said, look, the bureaucracy is still there from the British era, it's going to take you at least five days to get the power back on. And I thought, that's a real, real problem because my fish are going to die. And he said, there is one other way. It's jugad. And I had no idea what that meant. But what did happen was, two hours later, the power turned back on in my apartment. And that was the first time I learned what jugad meant. But to me, I did learn a lot about what it meant. And it did, you know, I think as the panelists have talked about, you know, it talks about a lot of creativity and inspiration. It's finding, you know, a solution to a problem with scarcity of resources. But I think to your point, Shu, um, my concern a little bit is that sometimes it's not long-lasting innovation, it's short-term. And it's working against the system rather than with the system. And I think, you know, your question about, you know, why is there less product innovation here than overseas? To me, it's probably the difference that Western countries take is probably they have a more structured process and they think a little longer term. Now, that's difficult to do here. India's moving so fast. But if you look at another statistic, you know, in FMCG, the best companies in India, you know, sort of typically four to 5% of their sales, you know, are new products that were launched in the previous year. In Western countries, that's 10 to 15%. And what they do is they do two things. One is they do probably a better job to actually filter out and get the ideas. And secondly, they support them for the long term. And in India, everyone knows about the infrastructure challenges. It takes a long time to get a brand in the right level of distribution. So you actually have to think long-term in terms of your your marketing, your marketing support. And to me, you know, that's probably one of the things that we need to think about in India to try and translate the ingenuity, which is absolute standout in this country, but combine it with a bit of process, a bit of long-term thinking. And that to me is how India is really going to stand out from a true innovation sense.
You had to add something to that, you know, in most innovation conferences around the world, and that's my recent sensing, is that there's a sense of cynicism that's growing everywhere about innovation methodologies. You know, the cynicism comes from the fact that most amazing and big world-changing, game-changing innovations that are spoken about at conferences, none of them seem to be an outcome of a premeditated, orchestrated process. Most of these seem like more like happy accidents. Now, that people come there to get inspired, come inspired by processes, they want to go back and implement those processes in their organizations, but also go back with the feeling, but that amazing one that actually seems more like someone had a vision and then just he went about and and did it. Now, that's where I believe. And also another cynicism comes out of the fact that where is it going to end? So many products, 100 products, 2,000 products, 3,000 products. I mean, the world is inundated with products. You you say, where is it going to end?
Can I just pose another question here to all of you? Saying, where does it all begin? I think culturally, we're very different from a lot of the other parts of the world where culturally, as children, we do not encourage innovation. They're very structured in their education. At home, we structure them completely. At home is where it all begins. Why can't it start as a process at a very young age? Why can't it be part of a curriculum?
Innovation is never talked about anywhere in school. That's exactly right. That's you, you hit it on the head. And if you want to be an innovative society, you've got to say, disrespect the past, start inventing the new, break the rules. Break the rules is one good rule I learned in advertising. One of the best rules in advertising is don't.
Ganesh, hand to your heart, I mean, how would you deal with someone in your organization dissenting for innovation or completely being, um, anti-voice to how the philosophy of the organization goes? How do you deal with it?
I have two points. I mean, one is, both the companies have run Aptech and Zenar have been full of the break the rules idea. In fact, in our appraisals, we ask people, how many mistakes did you make last year? That's the first question. And we try and make sure that there were big mistakes. The other point I want to make is, don't get too carried away by, you know, are our children getting too stressed, etc., etc. Once they get into an environment, could be an academic environment, could be a company where companies give them the opportunity to innovate, I would think they'll be successful. And the one point I'd like to make in contradiction to what you said is that I think we need a systematic approach to innovation. If we keep waiting like Newton under the under the tree, waiting for the apple to fall, you might find that a whole lot of opportunities are left out. Please inculcate a culture of innovation in organizations, institutions, and government.
Be looking at, you know, focusing on where its strengths lie, which means innovations which are more based on the lack of means, but therefore improving the quality of life within that, and therefore focus in that area rather than compete with the rest of the world on where they are going forward.
The whole point, Shu, that we in India, because we've had scarcities, we are all the time faced with necessity. They say necessity is the mother of invention, and it's damn true. And I think to myself that in India, we're not very inventive. But as soon as we go abroad, we become the deputy head of Harvard, and we become, and we, 30% of Silicon Valley is owned by Indians. How the hell is that? But they were in India, they couldn't do anything. Soon as they went to an environment which welcomed and worried ideation, they suddenly became not millionaires, but billionaires. Ideas is what creates wealth. So if India has to improve its ranking on the innovation bar, what is that one thing that you think India needs to do? Unless and until we have a sanctuary model and get away from incubator model. Incubation is when market is known, product is known, you tweak the solution and go forward. Sanctuary model is where the chaos is outside, order is outside. In incubator, the chaos is outside, order is inside. So we need to work in a chaotic framework of sanctuary. Second, we must think about early stage funding. And finally, I would say, like friends like Alec and many others, need to spend at least one day a week mentoring the people with the fire in their belly.
Justin, I think it's probably what I said before. I have a slightly longer term view. I think at the moment, we celebrate and reward short-term thinking. We need to think a little longer term. And R&D, India, product innovation is one thing. And surely, I mean, there are innovations of different kinds. You have process innovation, you have business model innovation. The world is now even talking about ecosystem innovation, where you re-architect the whole ecosystem. I think India can play a role there. And if you're talking about jugad, the sheer size and diversity of the country. Put a mobile phone, and there are a billion people. Look at and give each one a mobile phone and just watch the magic. Look at the way this innovation called mobile phone evolved very differently in a billion different contexts, that's at the ground level. So surely we need to have a system that harnesses all this creativity.
Well, I would say what I said a little earlier. Just as Nehru in his wisdom brought in IITs for developing technologists, I'm still saying that the government of India should seriously look at idea academies. Idea academies will encourage people who want to be ideators in any field. You know, we somewhere, I guess all of us do agree that no matter what the definition of jugad, no matter how much you disagree with it, but there are certain points of view on what jugad could mean. But we are in agreement that jugad and innovation could coexist, provided one leads to the other, and there is certain institutionalization and scientific approach to it with a bit of intuition also put into it. So jugad or innovation, whatever that might be, if not implemented, just remains an idea and not an innovation. Thank you so much, all of you.
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