From jugaad to disciplined frugal innovation

April 15, 2026 /Posted byKotresh EW

– Priyank Narayan is associate professor of practice, Department of Entrepreneurship, Ashoka University, Sonipat; Jaideep Prabhu is professor at Judge Business School, Cambridge University (UK) and Mukesh Sud is professor at IIM-Ahmedabad. For decades, India’s ingenuity has been captured in a single word: jugaad. It conjures images of resourceful individuals fixing problems on the fly with whatever is at hand — a motorbike engine powering an irrigation pump, or a hacked-together vehicle ferrying people in rural areas. This spirit has been rightly celebrated as a survival skill in a low-resource environment. Yet it has also been criticised as a licence for corner-cutting, unsafe improvisation, and a culture of “adjusting” rather than building robust systems. But India is now at an inflection point where it must move beyond ad hoc jugaad to a high-tech, frugal innovation model we describe as LeanSpark. India’s structural constraints — limited fiscal space, infrastructure gaps, low…

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From jugaad to disciplined frugal innovation

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