Frugal thinking
I’ve been doing some reading in preparation for a session that I’m running later this year with a group of students from Leeds Beckett…
I’ve been doing some reading in preparation for a session that I’m running later this year with a group of students from Leeds Beckett University.
My session is on the circular economy (more on this in a future post) — and the students have been exploring broader themes around the concept of frugal innovation. So I’ve taken the opportunity to read some of the books that they’ve been encouraged to read on their course.
I’ve just finished Jugaad Innovation — by Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu and Simone Ahuja. Jugaad is a Hindi word meaning:
an innovative fix, an improvised solution born from ingenuity and cleverness, resourceful.
The book explores how individuals, communities and businesses in “emerging economies” are taking a frugal, bottom-up approach to innovation — and how some bigger businesses across the world are looking to do the same.
You’ll find book reviews elsewhere so I won’t go into detail, but the key Jugaad principles are listed as follows:
Seek opportunity in adversity
Do more with less
Think and act flexibly
Keep it simple
Include the margin
Follow your heart
I can be a bit sceptical of books about business and innovation, and to be honest there were parts of this book that I found slightly irritating. It’s striking too how quickly things date — for example with the references to how David Cameron’s government were keen to learn from Jugaad to inspire the growth of Big Society. I found some takes, such as how the Free Schools initiative is in line with the principles of Jugaad innovation, naive at best.
Yet it’s incredibly refreshing to read a more global, diverse perspective on a topic like business and innovation.
And I do really like the core principles outlined above, and there are definitely ideas I think we can apply to our work — and more broadly to how we deal with the big issues we face as society.
It got me thinking about our Leeds School Uniform Exchange project — a project we’re immensely proud of, and which has achieved so much in the 18 months since we set it up.
The way we’ve gone about setting up the project is very much in line with those six Jugaad principles — and whilst we could *definitely* do with some bigger budgets (I’ll come onto our challenges securing funding in a future post) I do believe there’s a lot to be said about adopting a “frugal” approach to setting up a project like this.
Frugality — or more specifically an acknowledgement that there was likely never to be much money to support exchanges in the long term — informed our thinking on the model for our school uniform exchange. It’s based around a network of volunteer-led exchanges in local communities — run by local people for the benefit of local people. This is what we think has allowed us to grow the project quickly — and scale up our impact.
The project has also inspired us to think about how we can take a similar approach to other social issues — with our next step being the launch next month of a similar, people-powered project for sharing sports kit.
So whilst I will be the first person to say that society’s ability to respond to big social challenges is severely restrained by lack of investment — primarily from government, I do think there is a lot to be said for exploring how the Jugaad principles outlined in this book can inform the work that we, and others, do, to tackle big social issues.