Foreword

Ideas and creativity are the heart of my business, so when a book like Jugaad Innovation comes along, reframing as it does the language and methodology of innovation, it's time to get excited. As the authors note, this is a time of increasing complexity and greater scarcity of resources, of fractured financial models in the West, and confidently emergent economic powerhouses in the East and the South. What is revelatory is that the authors surface a new set of principles—from emerging markets such as India, Brazil, China, and Kenya—for breakthrough innovation that we must take notice of and start adopting if we are to regenerate growth.

I first met one of the authors—Jaideep Prabhu—at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, when I was CEO-in-Residence. One of the joys of my role was meeting people like Jaideep and listening to their nascent ideas for making the world a better place. With his collaborators, Navi Radjou and Simone Ahuja, Jaideep has brought the concept of jugaad to life with the full color and exuberance that is India.

This is a radically optimistic book and one that aligns with several strands of my own academic inquiry and gut instincts following forty years in business. My mantras unfold like this: be purpose inspired; change comes from the edge; devote yourself to world-changing ideas; emotion leads to action; creativity overcomes scarcity; in tough times, you need to win ugly. Their principles are parallel: be heart powered; seek opportunity in adversity; do more with less; include the margin; remain asset light; the world is too complex for the mind alone. My touchstone for innovation is “fail fast, fix fast, learn fast.” Theirs: “fail cheap, fail fast, fail often.”

Jugaad Innovation journeys through several of emerging markets' most innovative initiatives, from low-tech street corner entrepreneurs in the Philippines meeting the needs of a local community to large industrial conglomerates in India and China seeking to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The authors track a number of Western companies that have mirrored jugaad methods—Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo are two companies I have worked for—but on the whole conclude that “the Western innovation engine has become too rigid, insular, and bloated … consumes a lot of resources and makes a lot of noise but produces little of significance.” Ouch.

Jugaad is therefore both a wake-up call for mature companies with over-developed processes of institutional innovation, and a primer for how to be resourceful with scarce resources. In my home country of New Zealand, the jugaad equivalent is called “#8 wire.” In the early agricultural and industrial development of New Zealand, farmers and business people couldn't wait for the months it took for replacement parts or new machinery to arrive on the boat from Mother England—so they improvised solutions, made it up. It was amazing what could be achieved with a simple piece of fencing wire.

“Scarcity is the mother of invention” say the authors. Austerity is the new operating system both for many companies and indeed countries. Frugality is the framework of managers; re-using and recombining is a way of life for the characters who populate the pages of Jugaad Innovation, and it is a practice that we in the wasteful West need to learn and then get used to. In my business—communications, marketing, and advertising, aka selling—the advent of social media has slashed the type of budgets we were once used so. Creativity is our greatest savior. Great ideas are budget blind, it's just that we have little practice of working in this environment. Jugaad lights a path.

Where Jugaad Innovation really pumps my blood is in its discussion of “intuiting the latent needs of consumers.” Steve Jobs had this intuition and designed new products that people never imagined but are so obvious when they're in your hands. A classic frugalist, he defined presence as absence; he took away—the keyboard, the mouse, the computer box; he reduced and eliminated. My book Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands took the position that companies, if they were up to it, would be able to place themselves into the hearts of customers, be invited in, and be able to clearly answer the killer question that every customer has: “how will you improve my life?” The chest-thumping of companies who claim to put customers at the heart of what they do have the equation back to front. As the authors state, “your heart knows what your mind doesn't.” They advocate “following your heart” with intuition, empathy, and passion; my trifecta is “mystery, sensuality, and intimacy.”

The final element of jugaad to highlight is what I call “mental toughness.” The authors refer to “building up your firm's psychological capital to boost its confident resilience.” At Saatchi & Saatchi we have a founding statement of purpose: “Nothing Is Impossible.” To this I added “One Team One Dream.” Having crazies with purpose on your side is great; having unguided crazies is not. Just as I have invented, adapted, and stolen methods and techniques for organizing and keeping 6,000 people on the straight and narrow, these authors offer us a host of how-to's. You can't have a book about resourcefulness without resources, and Jugaad Innovation is generous in its roadmaps.

Until this book, the commonest currency I had with India was cricket. I captained cricket teams through my school years, beguiled by the mysteries of the googly (look it up on, um Google; it's a type of delivery bowled by a right-arm leg spin bowler) and the blatant power of hitting a six over square leg. Now I have jugaad, and my relationship with India and with innovation is reborn.

Kevin Roberts

CEO Worldwide

Saatchi & Saatchi

Grasmere, England

February 2012