How Fluxx uses JUGAAD innovation almost every day

As an Indian I’ve tried for years to explain jugaad to non Hindi speakers. There is no literal translation but there have been books written on the concept. The closest I can get to translating the concept is ‘ingenious hacks to make your everyday life easier’.

My analysis is that jugaad comes naturally to Indians because we have a number of things to work around on an everyday basis. As a developing market, India faces many day to day challenges. This makes Indians find ways around these problems and become naturally ingenious thinkers as a result.

My favourite example of jugaad is how my father in law fixed the curtain string in our house when it broke. He used a plastic string (from a clothes tag) to replace the broken curtain string. It was a temporary solution, but it didn’t look bad and did the job just fine.

You don’t have to have to be Indian to think jugaad. You just need to be open and wire yourself to think creatively when you have a problem

When I started working in innovation — I realised much of what we do is jugaad in the work place. Yes we design products and services, but what helps us get there are the makeshift solutions, the experiments we perform along the way.

At Fluxx we help big companies to think differently. That often involves working at pace; doing just enough to find the answer to a problem or prove product-market fit.

Sometimes, we make people nervous. “That’s not the proper way to do it,” they’ll say. Or “you’re not following the proper process.” But there are so many benefits to thinking jugaad.

Here are 5 examples of how we use jugaad at Fluxx everyday:

1. Good enough, but not perfect: Jugaad is full of makeshift and temporary solutions. When we help a company to create a minimum viable product, we’re not searching for something that is perfect. Instead we make something that works just well enough.
   Enough to test if customers would use it.
   Enough to validate a concept.
   Enough to know if we should actually launch the product or service. Doing just enough often lets us help companies to do much more. Instead of one big expensive trial, we’ll run five small experiments.

At Fluxx, when we wanted to understand how to plan transport systems for Cambridge, rather than invest in full scale infrastructure, we ran a service that simulated an on demand commuter bus. With real customers using the service, it was enough to tell us about customer behaviour – whether they would get out of their cars and use a public transport system, and how we should design routes that worked best for our customers.

2. Cost Effective: Jugaad is born out of necessity and the requirement to think of creative solutions within limited resources. In innovation, when we create test versions of products we need to deliver the most cost effective solution. This makes us think creatively about the way we use the resources at hand.

One such Fluxx case was when we were testing whether customers would react well to a bank giving spending and savings advice to customers. Rather than invest in a full fledged bot, we texted ‘smart money messages’ to 20 test customers. Customers thought they were interacting with the bank’s latest AI bot, but in reality, it was Nic from Fluxx, texting to understand customer behaviour. Over the course of a few weeks, we were able to validate how a customer would act in a real life scenario, and the only cost was a basic phone and SIM card.

3. Adaptive: Because jugaad is usually a cost effective, and often stopgap solution it gives room for tweaks and adjustments along the way. At Fluxx, we build in the ability to have the same approach to experiments; as and when we see something that doesn’t work, we tweak it quickly and try out a new way.

There is no fixed process for jugaad. People who think in this way stay observant and give solutions when needed. When we go to a client we go with a variety of tools, but don’t have a fixed process in mind, we have to adapt our approach to suit changing scenarios and conditions.

Fluxx clients GAME asked for a content strategy, but once we started working with them we realised we couldn’t provide one without understanding GAME customers and their needs. We adapted the brief, calling it ‘customers before content’. After three weeks of intensive research and four weeks of running experiments, we were able to build a content strategy based on genuine insight.

4. It’s a mindset: Jugaad is a way of thinking, it isn’t a solution to a single problem. When the manager at a factory for an SUV car in India realised that they couldn’t get the car out of the factory because it was built just a little too high to be driven out the exit door, they were considering breaking the door and the wall around it. A factory worker suggested removing some air from the tyres, and driving out with mostly deflated tyres. It worked fine, and the door stayed in place.

At Fluxx, we work with companies to develop solutions together, helping them acquire an internal innovation mindset to solve problems as they come along. During our long engagement with engineering giant Atkins, we’ve helped them develop a playbook of tools and techniques to identify innovation and new ways of thinking across the company.

5. The true power of jugaad: Little fixes are great, and can have significant impact. But if you can get everyone in your organisation to be permanently tweaking and improving, the impact is enormous.

Using creative thinking and encouraging simple mindset changes, we are able to make an entire organisation think differently — the ripple effect. At Fluxx, these are the movements we specialise in creating.

For some fun examples of jugaad, have a look at this link. For some fun examples of what we do at Fluxx, have a look here and subscribe here. Or check out our book.

Natasha is a senior innovation consultant at Fluxx and a former marketing and advertising professional. To find out more, write to natasha.lalwani@fluxx.uk.com