Jugaad is an innovation mindset and also a way of problem-solving in daily life in India. It loosely translates to ‘Hack’ in English, but in India, for everything that may seem difficult to do, you will very commonly hear someone say ‘Let’s find a Jugaad’ - a creative way around the system. Jugaad solutions are born out of constraints in resources and through resilience, and are therefore, very creative in their approach and design (You can read more about it here). While Jugaad has been criticised for its limitations with scalability, company leaders and innovators have sought to make it a part of the formal innovation process to capture its essence of resilience, creativity and fast problem-solving. Through our talk, we want to highlight Jugaad as a fresh approach for a resource-constrained future that will require us to live a minimal, carbon-neutral lifestyle. We believe that Jugaad as a mindset could inspire qualitative researchers to apply it to create solutions that are:
Jugaad seems more relevant in situations like this pandemic crisis when the resources are limited and there are new challenges emerging that we need to understand and solve rapidly. Many people have predicted that this pandemic is a wake-up call for us as humanity to deal with the looming crisis that climate change is going to present in the future. We believe that the Jugaad mindset can inspire a new way of thinking or approaching our research & design process and is therefore, only going to become more relevant in the future!