Analyzing Jugaad

West has already found the word for Jugaad - Frugal Innovation. Now they are all out to analyze it to the extent possible and write about it. Authors Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu and Simone Ahuja come together to write a book on Jugaad and in this HBR article they talk briefly about the characteristics of Jugaad. They opine that Jugaad is faster, cheaper, better, adaptable and inlusive. I think it is their own definition of jugaad and this may be A way of doing innovation. 

While I personally think Jugaad is being over-analyzed, it is a quick solution to a problem thought and implemented instantly by people when the obvious solution is not available. People do not do Jugaad systematically, it happens in the absence of solution or a resource that should have been there but is not there. E.g if you miss your train and hitch hike to your destination that is called Jugaad. If you plan to hitch hike in the first place that is not Jugaad. In the poplar parlance that the Jugaad is used, it is not repeated and it is not a permanent solution for the problem. 

Having the basic understanding of the word Jugaad, I am now thinking about how the definitions can change even when the word is translated to another language. I wonder if they would be ever able to find an exact translation of the word. Frugal innovation is an interpretation of the word. 

Limits of open innovation

Jim Whitehurst of Red Hat talks about the limits of open innovation in this video.

Good food for thought. You need to understand situations where open innovation works and where it may not. Sometimes it may work completely independently, sometimes it may work on the part of the complete innovation cycle. It can be a great source of idea generation where the product has consumers and it can be source where say the product is a software or a service.

Can you identify how is open innovation relevant for your organization?

Omni Channel retailing - Latest Jargon in retail

Bain & Co's Darrell Rigby talks about the future of shopping in HBR. It says: Customers want everything. They want the advantages of digital, such as broad selection, rich product information, and customer reviews and tips. They want the advantages of physical stores, such as personal service, the ability to touch products, and shopping as an event and an experience.  Different customer segments will value parts of the shopping experience differently, but all are likely to want perfect integration of the digital and the physical.

Author coins a term Omni Channel retailing that is a combination of information availability on online channels couples with a rich in-store experience. It says that traditional retailers do not innovate and face a threat from online stores. While online stores come with a lot of advantages they miss out on the customer experience. So the future would be a combination of two, where a user can identify the product to buy, find all information about it including the best deal available and then walk into the nearby store to pick it up. 

I agree the eventual future is a combination. Right now online and physical stores exist at two ends of the spectrum, each lacking the positives of the other. How the commination will work and would would be a good mix ratio for different retail segments is what we need to watch out for....

Middle management as Bottleneck

Paul Sloane in his article on how to sell your innovative ides to your boss ends up acknowledging that middle management is a bottleneck in most organizations. They do not let the bottom up ideas go beyond them. One primary reason for this is that they are no burdened with delivering their targets that they can not think of anything beyond them. Another could be that Innovation is not a part of their performance measuring parameters so they have no motivation invest any of their or their team's energy into initiatives which may or may not succeed. They would rather focus on what they know, what is within their control and succeed rather than put their bets on unknown turfs. 

This leads me to a question - For a successful innovation program, are organizations enabling the middle layer enough?

Reasons for failure of business model Innovation

Saul Kaplan mentions in his HBR articles the 5 reasons that companies fail at business model Innovation 

In my mind all this comes from the resistance to change at the top leadership level, particularly at the CEO level. It also comes from the short sighted view of quarterly results for the publicly listed companies. The pressure to deliver every quarter, which is not too long a period coupled with a comfort at the status quo prevent them from looking at the disruptive innovations like business model innovation.

This leads to a question should the ability to change or at least be open to change be a key criterion for choosing a CEO of the company. Should they be judged on how many different models have they explored in their term as CEOs?

At the same time we have companies like Coca-Cola which have flourished for more than a century on the same business model. They primarily do incremental innovation by way of introducing new products or penetrating new markets, but the business model has remained same. They work with partners across the world and excel in marketing. This leads to a question is the business model innovation a choice based on type and stage of business is it a must?

Innovation Myths & Realities

Scott Anthony's blog on HBR lists 10 Innovation myths and the corresponding realities.

I agree with most of them, but I wish if real life was so simple. Each of these myths have been built over a period of time and settled in our minds. It takes a lot of un-conditioning to accept the realities. More often than not, people will let go of the myth only after a personal experience. This means to make people believe in your realities, you have to create experiences for them or make them go through the experiences that will demystify the myths and make them work towards the realities.

Grocery shopping at virtual stores in public places.

Retail giant TESCO came up with this technology enabled sales channel to reach out to its customers who can now use their everyday wait time to finish grocery shopping, and receive the items at home. Definitely innovative. Let us see how this channel picks up for retailers around the world.

Some thoughts:

1. For most people grocery shopping is the only outing they get from daily routine of home and office? Would they choose this as a primary channel of grocery shopping.
2. This may be a good green initiative, saving a lot of fuel as many trips to grocery stores will be saved. Grocery store delivery can use logistics algorithms to optimize delivery routes if volumes pick up.
3. Channel may have to deal with issues that will crop with peak hour rush, which is the time when most shoppers will shop. Can the shoppers get the whole menu on their smart phones or tablets to use it during travel time?

I would like to track this channel and see how it evolves. Any customers out there, who would like to share their first hand experience of using this.

Spending time with the customer

MIX carries an article on the management trainee training program of Hindustan Unilever Ltd in India. As a part of this program, trainees spend substantial time in the rural India, participating in social programs like teaching in schools, understanding the ultimate customer and bringing out new ideas for the business.

Apart from the lessons mentioned in the article, I think the biggest advantage of these programs is the understanding that the company's people get about the business they are in, the impact their products have on people and society, the gaps that exists, the ethos that are relevant for the local market. I think, this should not be once in a lifetime activity for the management teams, this should be repeated at regular intervals, at least once in 4 years so that the management thought process remains in tune with the customer environment. 

I think the article gives too much importance to the various lists published by various publications. To my mind they are completely irrelevant. Publications need them to keep themselves in circulations. Organizations should make being in them their aim, although a lot of them have dedicated teams to work towards it. Your organization performance is not dependent on these lists.

Retail Stores - A re-look after 3 years

About 3 years back, I wrote about retail chains in India based on my personal experience. I was just thinking of taking stock of how things are after 3 years. I was hoping that the situation would have improved at least a bit, as my feedback was taken very seriously by the retail chains that I had mentioned.  Yesterday in a span of few hours I got all answers when I went shopping.

My first stop was SPAR, the happening supermarket in the heart of Hyderabad. I like them for the variety of  food items that they have including some that are not so usually found around my house. I reached the billing counter with a bulging trolley. There were two items in my trolley that has free items with them. After the billing, I asked for the free items and the guy just ignored me. I raised my voice by one notch and he said the items are inside the package. The opened the packaging and showed him that it is not and he has to provide it to me. He said ok and then went on to do his work. He asked me if I have a membership card, I asked does the Lifestyle card work here and he said No. I said Ok, only to realize later it should work. When I questioned him, he said anyway the billing has been done, now nothing can be done. I asked for the manager and he called the boy from the next Till and said he is the manager. When I asked him about the loyalty card and the free items, he swiped my card in the machine and said it will be done and called someone else to give the free items. Now the card did not have a magnetic strip so it could not have been swiped, when questioned, he noted the bill no and said he will do it later. When I did not give up, he opened some screens, did some clicks and said it is done, when I insisted to show, he said come after 3 days. I still had not got my free items, and its only after raising the voice by another few notches that I reluctantly got them. The look on the face was as if I am stealing them of their treasure. I asked for the manager and they said the manager is not there. I asked for manager's number and they refused to give. I asked the security guard who looked at them and said I do not know if there is any manager or not. Though I am describing this in detail, this is a common problem I have seen across malls that there is no responsible person whom you can raise your concern to, no telephone no and no e-mail Id. 

Next, I went to Landmark and a sale was going on where you buy 3 books for a price of 2. Obviously a promotion by the store to drive volumes at the cost of margins. Now I saw at least 3 different sets of strangers coming together to buy books and get the free book and then divide the bargain amongst themselves. 

I was hungry by now and went to Baker's Inn next door that had these big Pizza pictures pasted all over. The guy at the counter was on phone and definitely not interested in being interrupted by any customer. Before I could finish the word Pizza, he said "nahi hai". He did not offer me any alternative, did not even bother look if I can buy anything else. He does not loose anything, it is the business owner who looses a customer forever. 

Now, apart from agony over all the wasted energy, I think retail in India has a big risk of failing if the operations are not managed properly and people are not trained and managed properly. Large format retail stores have an army of people, who do not know much about the products around them and are hardly useful. Electronic surveillance can take care of the pilferage by customers, but this army can fool the cameras so easily. They breach the customer trust every time they cheat them with small things like holding back free items hurts both customer and the business. Instead of having 20 people on the floor, is may be good to replace a few of them with someone who is responsible for the store and is accountable for customer complaints.  There should be some channel for the customers to be able to lodge their complaints if the issue is not resolved at the store.

You will also have to figure out the potential losses that you are suffering because of employee indifference. In a large store if a product is available but  customer can not locate it and the employees are too busy either on phone or chatting amongst themselves, they cause a direct loss to the business. It may be very difficult to quantify such losses, but my guess is that it may not be something the businesses can afford to ignore. 

Next the promotions will have to be designed based on the local ethos. While the above mentioned promotion will work very well in western world where people are more individualistic, it may not work in India, where people can come together only for a bargain. 

There may be a need to check the use of mobile phones in customer services departments, because by nature the person on phone takes priority over the person in front of you. 

Its time that the retail stores focus in operations as much as they are on expanding. 

3 Boxes to Manage...

Vijay Govindarajan's HBR interview mentions three boxes that a CEO needs to take care of. I just loved this idea, and this picture says it all:

Try it !

ITE - Laundry Services at Tourist Locations

This one may be micro-enterprise.

Doing your laundry is a basic requirement wen you travel for more than few days. Laundry charges are very high at most hotels, sometimes more than the cost of the garment itself. You have a choice to buy new pair of garment but then carrying them is a constraint. In fact if convenient and reasonable laundry services are available, most travelers would travel far lighter than they do now.

Idea is to put a small washing machine at a convenient place, where people can go and do their own laundry for a per load cost. A dryer would be an additional help as would be an ironing board. The total cost of equipment can be around 20-25 K and the minimum can be 10 K. The constraints that you need to figure out is that of space and water availability. 

My hunch is that people would be willing to pay something like Rs 100-150 per load of washing, but this of course needs to be validated. Idea is small and can be easily tested a couple of locations. Long term travelers would love this. 

Analysis & Growth

Roger Martin in an HBR article says that 'You can not analyze your way to growth'. Basically he is trying to say that you can not predict growth based on the past data. More often than not past data will predict incremental growth only.

For defining exponential growth, you need to have a sense of the customer and an appreciation for what he needs. He gives examples from the FMCG space where exponential growth was achieved by launching new products that made life easier for the user.

I think analysis is a bit over-rated. While data can give you insights, it can give you only what is available between its blinkers. For new insights you have to depend on your instincts and interactions with your customers. There may not be any data to back up your new insights and that is why the element of risk is associated when you go on to address these insights.

ITE - Bill Management for Households

There are 10-15 monthly bill items that an average middle class household has to pay. Most of these bills land up at different points in time and have different due dates raging from a 1-3 weeks time after the bill is delivered.

Can someone develop an application where I can put all my monthly bills in one basket and pay at one go. There are a couple of ways this can be done:

1. Service provider can have a pre-paid option where I put an approximate amount for my total monthly bills. I upload information about all my bills at the beginning with an option to add / modify / delete. The application pays my bills as they come and uploads the receipts in my account. I do not have to bother about individual bill payment. I may choose an option to get every bill in my e-mail box to validate it or may be authorize it to be paid. 
2. The application should work out 1 or 2 dates which are most appropriate for me to sit and clear my bills for the month. 
3. Application can also work with my bill payees to send all my bills between my chosen dates and then collate them for me to pay.

A detailed study of this need, needs to be done. I think there will be a market for this service as people often forget to pay some bills unintentionally. With the traveling and mobile populations, paying the bills becomes even more tough, specially some bills like electricity bill that can not be paid electronically. It would need tie with regular bill sending agencies.

My laundry list of monthly bills to be paid is:

1. Mobile Bill for each family member
2. Electricity Bill
3. Water Bill
4. Gas Bill - for piped gas users
5. All Credit cards
6. DTH / Cable service
7. Maintenance of the building
8. Rent ( in case you live in rented accommodation)
9. School fees 
10. Membership fees for clubs 

Other optionals that can be explored are:

1. Newspaper bill
2. Milk Bill
3. Maid 
4. Driver
5. Dhobi

While the optionals may look difficult at the moment, I think that is where the real opportunity lies, specially with UID coming in and this can be the way to pay your support staff through a bank and force them to have an account.

If anyone wants to work on this, please get in touch with me.

Launching Ideas to Explore

During my numerous readings, during my everyday experiences, during my interactions with all kinds of people, often some thoughts and Ideas cross my mind. Some of them have the potential to be explored as potential businesses. For a long time, I kept the ideas in my mind thinking that may be someday I would work on them, but I realize that ideas also have a shelf life and if you do not experiment and work on them they either become obsolete or are done by someone somewhere.

So, from now on I want to post my ideas here, whenever I come across one, and they are openly available to anyone who wants to work on them. If you want to discuss them with me, I will be more than happy to take them to next level with you.

Tell me what do yo think about this. The first idea will soon follow.

Reverse Innovation

Vijay Govindarajan in an HBR article 'How to Build a reverse Innovation', talks about Stanford University's BioDesign program, where students are going to developing economies and figuring out how the reverse innovations can be done from there.

Reverse Innovation is nothing but frugal innovation ,where you have rigid constraints like resources and cost and you have to deliver may be 50% of the functionality of a sophisticated product at say 15-20% of the cost of the higher end solution. Most of these innovations have happened based on the 'Necessity is the mother of Invention' principle. 

Till now this has happened more to serve the markets that will not be able to afford the full blown solutions. In other words, these were the plain vanilla versions of the solutions that are sold to the richer economies. Now with the world economies moving towards a more equanimous environment, the reverse innovations may become standard solutions. 

Service Innovation instances

Paul Sloane in his latest newsletter gives an instance of Service Innovation that benefits both the organizations and the customers, saving both time and resources. He talks about self- check at airports, self help groups for common diseases which in some cases has helped lesser cases reaching the hospitals, of Ikea that lets its customers do the product assembly themselves and outfits like Threadless that depend on crowdsourcing the designs for their products. 

Now these cases sound very interesting and as of now they are almost unique in the way they engage the customer to do a part of work that was traditionally done by them. It is not as simple as it sounds. To let customers do a part of your job, you have to make the job so simple and intuitive that customers can do them without needing any kind of help otherwise you are creating another service monster for yourself. 

Having said that, I think there is a lot of scope in service innovations as that is where most customer complaints lie, so by improving the service or by involving the customers in the service, you are improving the customer experience which would for sure impact the customer loyalty and retention. 

Too much feeback

Scott Anthony in an HBR article asks a very relevant question in the Innovation Process:

Are you giving too much and may be contradictory feedback to the ideas before they are presented to the ultimate decision makes?

Are you killing the raw idea by making it acceptable to all and exciting to none?

Innovation process designers need to create a balance between providing feedback to Idea generators and diluting the idea due to excessive feedback.

Bust your Innovation Myths

Art Markman in his HBR article tells you to bust your Innovation Myths. And for a change I like an HBR article. We indeed need to understand that lot of well celebrated innovations did not actually happen in an 'Eureka' moment. There was a whole lot of work that went behind the scenes before someone took credit for it all and portrayed as if it happened in one genius moment. 

This explained, we need to understand that coming out with innovations, big or small, needs a disciplined and persistent effort and that too on part of a team and not just one individual. Even if you get the idea in a magic moment, you need to work on making it a practical reality by testing it, tweaking it and working on its application. All this needs hell lot of effort and patience. Magic moment myths sometimes tend to convey the otherwise and create apprehensions in those are working on innovation programs.

100 years of IBM

HBR talks about 100 years of IBM, the years that saw depression, war and competition. 

Just a few years ago, the same magazines were writing off IBM. Today, they talk about its survival through various ups and downs, it adaptability through various changing external and internal environments. In a true HBR style they come out with 4 points that made them survive. How I wish life was that simple !

It is so simple to look at a giant organization like IBM and say these are the 4 factors that made them successful. Can it be dependent on a single individual as the author of the article tries to portray. An organization that has lived and lived successfully for 100 years is definitely worth studying. And IBM has many more reasons besides longevity to be a subject of study for organization scientists and management enthusiasts. We need to look at its lows as well as we need to look at its highs and the reasons why it oscillated between them. Why belittle it by restricting it to 4 points.

Gary Hamel on Organizations for Humans

Gary Hamel talks about organizations that are fit for humans in his video at Managament Innovation Exchange. 

I have always liked Gary's work, specially when talks about Innovation. Though I do not agree completely with what he says about humanizing organizations, I do agree that we need to go back to being human. The age of industrialization tended to make humans into machines, where they would come out with a predictable output, almost killing their creativity. Now the world is not necessarily getting de-industrialized, but there is an emergence of more democratic spaces both for creativity and for its expression. Spaces like internet are as democratic as you can expect it to be. We do not know about tomorrow if it also get monopolized by the large or powerful organizations, but as of today it provides an almost equal opportunities to those who have access to it. 

Not sure how much the established organization work towards making their work places good for human creativity, and even if they do, how much time will it take for them to really achieve it. But go and experiment with your own creativity and express it.

Can technology help us reduce consumption?

Sanjay Dalal applauds President Obama's drive to make more fuel efficient cars and tells us about a program that would help American's save $2 Trillion.

My question to Sanjay and if possible to Mr. Obama is : Do you think you can take care of the ecological problems and hence lot of financial problems by pumping more money into discovering new consumer objects while not knowing what to do with the ones that already exist?

Can you work on reducing consumption - by way of providing better public transport or encouraging car pools or encouraging local consumption, rather than encouraging consumption and then within it looking ways to reduce the usage of one particular item?

Can you invest in technology that helps us reduce the overall consumption and not just the consumption of depleting resources, because today it is one item that we know is depleting, tomorrow it will be another? Then, would you change the whole paradigm and create programs centered on those products. Think holistically and beyond just your career shelf life or your generation.

Six Thinking Hats

Paul Sloane very simply explains Edward De Bono's Six thinking hats in a small tutorial...

I thought the De Bono's six thinking hats were a proprietary tool and you can not use it without their permission...

Boredon / Observation for Innovation

Scott Anthony in an article @Innosight talks about how Boredom can drive Innovation. Though cleverly titled, the article is meant to share his 15 minutes observation outside a medical shop or the pharmacy to use the right word. His observations are not unique, nothing that you would not know if you live in India, but from an outsider's perspective there are a couple of information points ( I would dare not call them insights)  on how pharmacy retails work in India. 

Now the author had these observation while he was getting bored on the road, but I would say you can be observant anytime and anywhere irrespective of your status of boredom. You can be observant while you are very interested in something or someone. Curiosity is more important to be a good observer than anything else. And yes, a neutral out of frame observations give you the best insights into people and situations. Look at the people around you who you would never call Innovative and you would find that they are not as curious and hence not observant. 

As they say in creativity circles - Curiosity is the key to creativity and hence can we extend it to Innovation.

Jugaad and the world Media

Is Jugaad being over hyped and beaten to death...? Now they have coined the term for our Jugaad....Frugal Innovation. I wonder if the terminology actually reflects the width that Jugaad covers and if you can derive a model out of this general term that is used for anything from a simple trick to roundabout dealings with an objective to get the desired output.

Jugaad is a method where the means do not matters, it is only the result that matters, and more often than not the means could be unfair too.

Net Promoter Score...

Roger Martin in his HBr article The Innovation Catalysts mentions an interesting concept of Net Promoter score (NPS) that is being used by Intuit, a software development company.

NPS gets calculated on the answers to one simple question by Intuit's customer. The question is "Would you recommend this product to your friends or colleagues?" And they can answer on a scale of 10 with 0 being most unlikely and 10 being extremely likely. Scores 0-6 are counted as Detractors, 7-8 as Passives and 9-10 as Promoters. Now subtract the percentage of detractors from percentage of promoters and you have the NPS. Simple, Isn't it.

Now to improve the NPS company needs to work on reducing the no of detractors and increasing that of promoters.  And is that not all that an organization needs to focus on?

Information revolutions in the history of mankind

Historian Elin Whitney-Smith in her interview on Strategy and Business identifies 5 major information revolutions in the history of mankind and shows how the leaders were replaced by the innovators on the fringes of the society and how the leaders ignored change that was all around them. 

I like her view on how in the revolutions, be it hunter gatherer, be it printing press and be it the latest digital revolution, it was always the access to information and an ability to organize it that made the difference. In all the revolutions the new leaders had a better handle on the information. 

Innovative Thinking

Tony Golsby-Smith's article on Innovative thinking in HBR recommends hiring people from humanities. Tony says that people who study literature and arts can see the big picture and hence bring those perspectives to table. I agree the people with humanities background should have more curiosity than say management students but I guess the scientists should have the same curiosity. The argument that humanists are trained to be curious is not universally true. I am not sure about the ability to get under the customer's skin too as that requires ability to connect with people which is not people in any field are trained to be, it is something some people are born with and some learn through experiences. 

In my opinion this argument can be generalized. You ned diversity in your workforce and in your management teams. This will bring in the ideas from various fields that you can then customize for your industry and environment and use. And it is time organizations acknowledge that education just provides the base grounding is not an end all that they should look at before hiring people, just like they should  avoid the trap created by alumni of B-schools that makes them believe they are the best. There are enough examples to prove the otherwise. 

Tata Innometer

Tata Innometer is an interesting tool that the Tata group uses to measure the need of Innovation in the organization. It measures two parameters i.e. the process of Innovation and the culture of Innovation. Now this is one of first formalized process I have noticed where the culture is put at an equal footing with the process.

The process of Innometer involves the senior, middle and junior management. One of the most holistic tools that I have come across.

I want to talk to someone who has used this tool...to find out how it is practically used and how effective it is.

Generation C

Strategy + Business in its latest paper coins the new term Generation C for people born after 1990 and lived their adolescent years  after 2000. Reason they call them C is because they would be :

1. Connected
2. Communicating
3. Content centric
4. Computerized
5. Community Oriented
6. Clicking Always

They also predict that this generation by 2020 would form the 40% of the population in US, Europe and BRIC countries and about 10% on the rest of the world. I think this 10% needs some clarification though. They also indicate that they would be the group that marketers would run after. 

My only fear after reading this detailed report is that this generation would loose the human touch altogether it seems. They would be living literally in a digital world, something like the characters of sci-fi movies. Will they miss the human touch or it is something that they would not know anything about?

Vijay Govindrajan on Innovation

Vijay Govindrajan's insights on how to take innovations to market in S&B actually talks about how to balance innovation engine and performance engine ( the core business) within an organization so that revenue generation is ensured both for today and tomorrow. 

He talks about the ideal way to place the two engines in the organization chart, so that they compliment each other rather than compete with each other. He also emphasizes that companies that intend to be innovation driven should not underestimate the role of performance engine which is generating the revenues today. 

One of the most balances, insights based article that I have read on Innovation and I agree with everything that he says.