Navi Radjou: Creative Problem-Solving In The Face Of Extreme Limits

Innovation and leadership expert, Navi Radjou discusses what we can learn from some of the developing world's most creative and frugal entrepreneurs. When growing up in a developing country, you instantly learn to gain more value from limited resources and find creative ways to reuse what you already have. When extraordinary resources are scarce, you have to go within yourself to tap the most abundant resource - human ingenuity - and use this ingenuity in a clever way to solve problems. Doing more with less in the essence of frugal innovation. Frugal innovation is the ability to create more economic and social value using fewer resources. Frugal innovation is not about making do, it's about making things better.

Navi Radjou is an innovation and leadership thinker based in Silicon Valley. Drawing on his Indian upbringing, he was the first (with his co-authors) to capture the phenomenon of jugaad—a Hindi word for improvised solutions born out of ingenuity in resource constrained settings. His first book, a global best-seller of the same name, Jugaad Innovation, shows how companies and entrepreneurs can unleash and harness the grassroots ingenuity of employees, customers, and partners to co-create simple but effective solutions that deliver greater value at a lower cost.