“People call it jugaad-innovation. Its core tenet is to not give up. It insists that a practical solution can be found for any problem through intense experimentation. And it encourages getting off the beaten track in search of a solution.”

It’s now back in the reckoning.
It’s the same jugaad-innovation spirit that’s been behind the repeated bounce-backs of the Indian IT Services industry. Every setback has made the key players stronger. Now TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, Satyam, and others are reshaping the global IT Services industry with their global delivery model.
Some people prefer to call this energy as constraint-based problem-solving innovation. No matter what you call it, it is at the heart of the strong business model and the process innovation capability that the Indian industry has today.
What started off as an innovative spirit has now morphed into a whole innovation ecosystem. It has a variety of market participants who quickly align behind any new problem and offer practical business– or process model solutions. Their success stories have created a self-sustaining momentum. Today this ecosystem is strong, vibrant and mature.

Jugaad-Innovation Ecosystem at Work
The mobile industry in India is on a tear. In this boom, Bharti Airtel has emerged as the poster-child for a lean wireless operator. It has higher margins than conventional mobile operators despite having a substantially lower average-revenue-per-user (its ARPU is only 20% of what it is in the West). It’s no exaggeration to say that today Bharti Airtel’s lean business model is as significant to the rest of the telecom industry as Wal-mart’s business model is to the retail industry, or SouthWest’s business model is to the airline industry.
How did Bharti Airtel get here? It is not a result of a single grand insight. Instead, it’s a result coalesced and accumulated over

time. What’s more, as is typical of
an innovation ecosystem, it is not a single grand insight. It’s a result of several small business model experiments and Bharti Airtel didn’t do it all alone. It benefited from a number of partners that had also embraced the same jugaad-innovation philosophy. One such partner has been IBM. Yes, IBM. In a very true sense, IBM has gone multi-local. It has become part of India’s jugaad-innovation ecosystem.
As a testimony to their strong innovation partnership, this year NASSCOM has chosen Airtel-IBM together as one of the Innovation Awards winners.
In many sectors, collaborative model and business process innovation is happening. The results are radical but they are always built on iterative and experiment-based baby-steps.
A another award winner this year, Kale Consultants, is bringing the benefits of the jugaad-innovation to airline passenger revenue accounting. This is not a conventional BPO service. Kale brings its own software, facility, business process, and people to the table. Rather than charge on headcount, it charges a transaction fee. It aggressively looks for productivity improvements in collaboration with its airline customers.

Jugaad-Innovation Ecosystem is Evolving
When it started out, the jugaad mindset was a gritty, never say die, improvisational energy source. It’s become much more so over the last ten years. It has acquired rigour through a deep embrace of continuous improvement methodologies.
This evolution of the jugaad mindset has had tangible outcomes. In manufacturing, India now has more Malcolm Balridge Quality level award winners than any other country except Japan. In software development, India has the largest number of SEI CMM Level 5 certified software development centers.