Jugaad

Innovation carries an important question within: Whose idea determines its need and who benefits from its emergence? In our quest to “innovate,” we have adopted the idea of move-fast-and-break-things as the grounding norm with little to no attention to the cost at which such innovation arrives. History has shown us that some of the key innovations that disrupted erstwhile ways of doing things arrived on the backs of some measure of exploitation, with some degree of over-engineering, and with the powerful making critical decisions on the innovation itself. Consumption culture has augmented this with scant regard for sustainability and durability, so that whole communities are hooked to a cyclical journey between break and buy. Jugaad, a concept from northern India, offers wisdom that can shift this reality.

Before proceeding further, we want to name the fact that Jugaad has attracted significant attention from Western business and innovation circles, and this has created the risk of romanticization and extraction. As a result, a survival practice born of constraint and exclusion has been flattened and translated into a management philosophy for the already comfortable. We try to hold this tension here, drawing on the concept's genuine ethical insights while being honest about how it has sometimes been misappropriated.

Understanding Jugaad

Jugaad is a Hindi and Punjabi word that describes improvised, resourceful, and at times frugal solutions. It refers to the kind of innovation that emerges from necessity, constraint, and intimate knowledge of a problem rather than from well-funded labs and design sprints. Jugaad offers a solution that works best with all that is available, refuses to wait for ideal conditions, and prioritizes function over elegance.

Jugaad has produced some powerful and genuinely transformative technologies at the grassroots. This includes low-cost refrigeration for communities without reliable electricity, adapted agricultural tools from salvaged parts, and affordable medical devices designed for rural clinics, among others. These innovations were created by and for the communities that needed them, not designed elsewhere and delivered top-down as solutions they had to adopt.

However, it must be remembered that the constraints within which jugaad emerges and operates are in themselves reflections of inequity in access, affordability, and in many cases, awareness of resources, rights, and options. These inequities are systemic and structural and must be interrogated and dismantled to make equity and justice a reality. Naming jugaad as a principle to learn from is not to dismiss this truth, but to recognize, acknowledge, and name this truth while also making space for the implicit critique of mainstream innovation culture it holds within. Mainstream innovation culture carries an element of wastefulness, depends on abundance, tends to over-engineer, and is largely disconnected from the communities it claims to serve. Jugaad grounds us in the understanding that the people closest to a problem usually know the most about the problem and are best disposed to arrive at a solution that can actually be implemented in the conditions where the problem emerged and exists.  

What Jugaad unsettles in AI governance

AI has become one of the most resource-intensive industries in human history. The energy consumption of large language models, the hardware required to train and run them, and the concentration of the necessary infrastructure in a handful of locations and companies, all mean that the direction of AI is being determined by those with access to enormous resources, for problems they identify as important.

Jugaad asks us what AI might look like if it were developed from another direction, namely starting from actual community needs, working with available resources, optimizing for accessibility and local relevance rather than benchmark performance. This is a reminder to ask who the development of those systems is actually for and whether the communities with the least resources are being designed for or designed around.

Jugaad thus offers us an anchor in the form of the principles of proportionality and accessibility. Governance frameworks that require extensive legal resources, technical expertise, or regulatory infrastructure to comply with will, by definition, exclude the communities that most need protection. Governance itself needs its own jugaad in the form of solutions that work in conditions of constraint, and not just in ideal institutional environments.

Jugaad is a call to interrogate the reality that the benefits of AI are privatized, but the harms are socialized. It is an affirmation that the abundance assumption coded into the AI lifecycle, that is, the assumption that data, land, and water are available in abundance when they are not, results in the extraction and appropriation of these resources to the additional detriment of the least resourced.

Thus, Jugaad asks us what AI governance would look like if it were designed for communities with the fewest resources rather than for the most well-resourced actors. It is also a reminder that this divide cannot be normalized, as the solution in the form of accessible AI would at best address a symptom than the underlying inequities and power differentials. Jugaad asks the innovation industry to reflect on something deeper: What is lost when we treat abundance as a prerequisite for good solution and who pays the cost of that assumption?

References

• Basu, R. R., Banerjee, P. M., & Sweeny, E. G. (2013). Frugal innovation: core competencies to address global sustainability. Journal of Management for Global sustainability, 1(2), 5.

• Birtchnell, T. (2011). Jugaad as systemic risk and disruptive innovation in India. Contemporary South Asia, 19(4), 357-372.

• Gupta, A. K. (2016). Grassroots innovation: Minds on the margin are not marginal minds. Random House India.

• Radjou, N., Prabhu, J., & Ahuja, S. (2012). Jugaad innovation: Think frugal, be flexible, generate breakthrough growth. John Wiley & Sons.