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What Obama Can Learn From India

Does India's impressive economic growth offer lessons for the U.S.?

Seek Small, Flexible Solutions

Nov em ber 7 , 2 01 0

Shamnad Basheer is the Ministry of Human Resource Development Professor in I ntellectual Property law at the National University of Juridical Sciences in Calcutta. He is
also the founder of SpicyI P, an intellectual property and innovation policy blog that focuses on I ndia.

Small is beautiful, said a very wise E. F. Schumacher. The Tata group took this message to heart and came up with a tiny
piece of ingenuity: the Tata Nano.

This perhaps is an “innovation” paradigm that Indian companies appear to be adopting in large
"Jugaad" is a
numbers and that the U.S. could learn from. In the U.S., Godzilla is still king, and big is
mindset, suggesting
considered not just beautiful, but inevitable.
an ability to work in
settings that lack
Some call this Indian approach the "reverse" innovation paradigm. Some also refer to it as
clear cut processes
"jugaad," a term that broadly suggests cheap, ingenious solutions in a resource-constrained
and are given to
setting, like a scooter-engine powered mini flour-mill.
more chaos and
Jugaad is also a mindset, suggesting an ability to work in a setting that lacks clear cut processes chance.
and is given to relatively more chaos and chance. For a people that believes in destiny and prays
to a multitude of gods, recognizing the limits of human control and leaving things to chance perhaps comes more
naturally.

Interestingly, one of India’s top scientists, C.N.R. Rao, recently revealed how he managed to do exciting research in India,
despite lacking state-of-the-art lab equipment. His technique was to work on new and interesting ideas and problems,
where even crude measurements would work reasonably well. This way, assuming his findings made sense, others with
more sophisticated equipment could measure and test out its validity.

This is not to suggest that these innovation paradigms are without problems. There are still many organizational and
cultural barriers to be overcome, legal and intellectual property challenges and risk averse mindsets to be changed. As one
commentator rightly notes:

“The biggest danger, in my view, is in elevating jugaad too high – using it to pat ourselves on our back as a highly creative
people bursting with ingenuity, without a clear-eyed examination of the zones in which jugaad works and where it
doesn’t.”
Topics: Asia, Barack Obam a, Econom y , India

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