The Indian IT and ITES industry is now big even by global standards. Though it may not be visible at the surface there is a strong innovation theme that’s running through the system. Understanding this innovation theme is not straightforward. Just like the country itself, things look chaotic from afar. It’s only when you look deeper patterns become visible.
What is immediately obvious is that there are many innovation ecosystems at work. Despite the inevitable overlaps, they are quite distinct from each other. They are also at different stages of maturity.
A good place to start our interpretive study of the innovation landscape is with the IT Services sector of the industry.

Jugaad Innovation Ecosystem – Roaring Success
In the last 20 years, IT Services has gone from being a minnow to an elephant. Strange as it might sound to some, the reality is that this enormous growth hasn’t been a straight line; it has been punctuated by major challenges along the away.
Way back in the early 90s, when the tariff barriers in India came down dramatically (effectively killing the domestic server vendors), a product engineering services industry took off and the notion of R&D-for-hire was born. Another inflexion was the shift from onshore to offshore, in part, precipitated by the visa limits getting exhausted in late-90s. When the offshore application

development and maintenance growth threatened to cool off after the Y2K boom, the industry broadened offshoring into a number of new areas and the BPO industry took root.
These repeated bounce-backs and course-corrections can be attributed to a powerful, gritty, improvisational energy that’s been running through Indian society for some time. Up in the north of India, 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.
Double-Tongued Dictionary, which documents words from the fringes of English, describes a jugaad solution as an “improvised or jury-rigged solution” exhibiting inventiveness, ingenuity, and cleverness. Singapore’s Strait Times, in an article on “What’s culture got to do with IT?” talks glowingly of the “jugaad” factor and the “innate ability of every Indian to do an improvised quick- fix”.
When the Indian economy was closed, this type of innovation was needed to just survive. As the economy opened up, Indian industry re-purposed this jugaad-innovation to create globally competitive companies in a range of industries. For instance, most analysts, even domestic ones, had written off the Indian manufacturing sector. But it didn’t die. It transformed itself. It took on a new form.