ABSTRACT
People are encouraged to use some jugaad when faced with a blank wall, or a difficult situation. Jugaad is creative improvisation, a tool to somehow find a solution, ingenuity, a refusal to accept defeat, initiative, quick thinking, cunning and resolve. The editorial of another edited volume of case studies on innovation by the business news weekly Businessworld, notes similarly that innovation for many Indians is “jugaad – the way of finding solutions to great problems using little more than ingenuity and a can-do spirit”. The celebratory slant notwithstanding, it is evident that jugaad in these publications is dealt with only in a perfunctory manner. The jugaad might eventually become a commercial success, but in the first instance it lies outside the broad framework of the market place. Jugaad, the implication seems to be, is too playful, random and unsystematic for it to be taken seriously; what we need, therefore, is systematic innovation.
