Jugaad: Unleashing the Creativity of Your Employees, Customers, and Partners
Drawing on his global bestseller Jugaad Innovation (over 200,000 copies sold), Navi will show how you can apply the proven business principles of jugaad
—a Hindi word for frugal and flexible innovation—to sense and respond swiftly to big market opportunities and outsmart competition. You will learn how to unleash the grassroots “MacGyver ingenuity” of your employees and partners, encourage productive risk-taking, gain in agility and resilience, and innovate faster, better, and cheaper.
Frugal Innovation: The Art of Doing Better with Less
Drawing upon his award-winning book Frugal Innovation published by The Economist, leading innovation expert Navi Radjou will show you can apply frugal principles and techniques to boost agility, innovate efficiently, and create 10x and even 100x more value using 10x/100x fewer resources. With a trillion-dollar global market for frugal products and services, and growing demand from customers for socially and environmentally-conscious products, Navi will show you can “do better with less”—by getting high-quality sustainable products to market faster, better, cheaper.
Beyond AI: Leading Wisely In The Post-Digital Society
Drawing on many inspiring real-life stories of wise leaders and his acclaimed book From Smart To Wise, Radjou will identify six core capabilities that managers at all levels can cultivate and use to operate consciously as a wise leader every day. Wise leadership is the foundation for lasting success in the emerging post-digital society, in which values-driven Generation Z employees and customers—who just overtook Millennials to represent 32% of the world’s population in 2019—seek meaning in life and want to work for, and buy from, purpose-driven companies.
Intrapreneurship: How Large Organizations Can Accelerate Growth Through Innovation
Using many real-life case studies based on his 25 years of consulting work with large companies, Navi will show how your organization can master “intrapreneurship”—the art of reinventing your business model and “future proofing” your company, while running business as usual. Navi will share proven frameworks and best practices you can use to innovate faster and better—by balancing scale and agility, encouraging productive risk-taking, leveraging the creativity of all your employees, cultivating external partnerships, and fostering wise leadership.
The Rise of China and India: Reinvent Your Firm for Global Growth
The world’s middle class will grow from 2 billion today to 5 billion by 2030. To capitalize on the rapid rise of emerging markets like China, Africa, India multinationals must abandon their insular and monolithic innovation model—that concentrated R&D resources in the West. Instead, they must embrace a “networked” innovation model in which R&D capabilities are distributed globally to sense and respond rapidly to local market needs—and yet are integrated in a loosely-coupled global innovation network to drive creative synergies on an international scale. Drawing on his twenty years of consulting experience in the US, Europe, and Asia, Navi Radjou shows the business benefits of networked innovation and offers a practical roadmap for traditional companies to embrace this new innovation model fit for success in the global knowledge economy of the 21st century.
Navi Radjou is an innovation and leadership thinker based in Silicon Valley. Drawing on his Indian upbringing, he was the first (with his co-authors) to capture the phenomenon of jugaad—a Hindi word for improvised solutions born out of ingenuity in resource constrained settings. His first book, a global best-seller of the same name, Jugaad Innovation (over 200,000 copies sold), shows how companies and entrepreneurs can unleash and harness the grassroots ingenuity of employees, customers, and partners to co-create simple but effective solutions that deliver greater value at a lower cost.
Throughout the 25 years of his career—spanning the public sector to market research and then as an academic and author—Navi’s ideas have been shaped by his eclectic cultural background including his Indian roots, his French education, and his current Silicon Valley milieu.
Navi’s most recent book, published by The Economist in 2015, is named, Frugal Innovation: How To Do More With Less (with a foreword by Paul Polman, CEO, Unilever), shows how companies can innovate faster, better, and more sustainably in today’s customer-driven economy shaped by climate change. It won the CMI Management Book of the Year 2016 Award. Navi is also co-author of the book, From Smart To Wise, a book on next generation leadership that CEO coach Marshall Goldsmith calls “fascinating” and PepsiCo’s ex-CEO Indra Nooyi views as “a practical guide for accelerating your own wise leadership development.”
More recently, Navi has been expanding on the concept and practice of frugal innovation well beyond the economic realm to solve our toughest social, environmental, and public policy challenges. He will publish his next book, Conscious Society: Redefining Who We Are and Reinventing How We Consume, Work, Relate, and Live in 2021 on this topic.
Navi has received the prestigious Thinkers50 Innovation Award—given to a management thinker who is reshaping the way we think about and practice innovation, and is ranked as one of the 50 most influential persons shaping innovation in France. His TED talk on frugal innovation has garnered over 1.7 million views.
Navi is curator of WAVE: How Collective Ingenuity Is Changing The World—a major exhibition on grassroots innovation and entrepreneurship produced by BNP Paribas that has traveled to major cities around the world—including Paris, San Francisco, Istanbul, and Mumbai—since 2014.
Until 2011, he served as Executive Director of the Centre for India & Global Business at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, where he is currently a fellow. Previously, he was a longtime VP/analyst at Forrester Research in Boston and San Francisco and advised senior executives worldwide on breakthrough growth strategies. Navi has consulted with leading international organizations—including E&Y, GM, Fujitsu, IBM, Microsoft, P&G, SAP, and TCS.
He has served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Design Innovation. His work has been featured on NPR, BBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Fast Company and Financial Times. He regularly writes in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review and strategy+business. Navi has addressed audiences across the world in venues like the World Economic Forum, Council on Foreign Relations, Harvard, and MIT.
Born and raised in India, Navi holds dual French-American citizenship. He studied at Ecole Centrale Paris and the Yale School of Management. He lives in Palo Alto, California.