Total Credits: 1.0 Advance Credits
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!
| Presentation Slides (4.1 MB) | 35 Pages | Available after Purchase |
Being a Design Thinker, Nikhita focuses on identifying innovation possibilities through human-centred approach at Xeno. Her keen interest in identifying inter-connections between local culture, evolving societal mindsets and its effect on consumer and business strategies, drives her in building deeper conviction while crafting new innovation opportunities and gauging its social impact for current and future scenarios. Her background in Product Design (graduate diploma from MIT Institute of Design, Pune) comes handy while translating the insights into tangible and implementable solutions.
Nikhita is a design expert with experience in handling, managing and leading product & service innovation cases. Prior to co-founding Xeno, she was a lead strategist at an innovation consulting company; Turian Labs. She has wide experience in design research, innovation strategy and design implementation projects across industries including consumer durables, consumer electronics, automobile, digital services, interior spaces & lifestyle, UI/UX for both global and local clients. She is also proficient in undertaking future trends forecasting, driving & facilitating organisational capability building around Design Thinking & innovation.
Swar drives the design process at Xeno facilitating the translation of user insights into actionable strategies for design solutions. She works at the intersection of service design, human-centred research and social innovation. Her stubborn optimism coupled with her background in social innovation fuel her ambition to explore the potential for creating a positive social impact through every project. She has worked in Mumbai, New York and Stockholm over the past few years and enjoys working in new places to learn about diverse cultures and people. Prior to founding Xeno, she worked with Veryday (part of McKinsey design) where she worked across industries including finance and automotive with a large part of experience focused in healthcare. She has a breadth of experience ranging from conducting research globally, to helping companies identify customer-centric services to customer-centric capability building for companies. She has earned a master's degree in Design for Social Innovation from School of Visual Arts, New York and holds a graduate diploma in Graphic Design from MIT Institute of Design, Pune.
return to qrca.org