The hour-long webinar, which takes place on Tuesday 15 July at 13:00 (GMT+1), will be hosted by Professor Jaideep Prabhu, Director of Cambridge Business School’s Centre for India and Global Business, and also co-author of Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth, which has been highly acclaimed by a number of global business figures and organisations including Saatchi and Saatchi, Renault-Nissan, the Financial Times, the BBC and The Economist.
Frugal innovation, also known as ‘jugaad’, originates from the developing world and is based on the concept of ‘doing more with less’, a notion that the Western world is beginning to explore.
For the record-level $638 billion that Western firms spent on R&D in 2012/13, Jaideep believes there was not a steady enough stream of ground-breaking innovations to come out of the top spending industries to justify capital investment as a credible source of innovation.
Jaideep will echo parts of his book and provide examples of some of the world-leading organisations that already actively practice frugal innovation, including GE, GSK, IBM, Nestle, Pearson, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Renault, Siemens, Tata Group and Unilever. The underlining theory is that a harsher economic landscape has resulted in firms no longer being able to rely on the more traditional methods that have sustained innovation efforts including expensive R&D projects and highly-structured innovation processes.
Jaideep explains: “In the webinar we we will look at how a few path-breaking organisations are adopting frugal innovation techniques in response to downward pressures on household and government budgets in the developed world, and increased competition from low-cost rivals from emerging and developed markets alike.”
Participants will also be able to interact during the webinar including a Q&A session at the end.