Systematic Innovation : Why 'Jugaad' is not good for India Inc.

The Building Blocks of Systematic Innovation: Rather than being a standalone entity, innovation should be a process which includes:

• Identifying problems that need to be solved or pain areas which need some improvement.
• Coming up with ideas which need not necessarily be unique from all the ideas in the past.
• Taking concrete steps to implement and bringing those ideas into action.
• Measuring the benefits derived from the implementation of  the idea.

Creating an Environment for Innovation
In order to have an environment that is favorable to innovation the following needs to be taken care of:

• Recognize the constraints within which an organization exists. Not all ideas can be applicable across all organizations.
• Make an active effort to award and motivate people to come up with new ideas even if some of their ideas have flopped in  the past.
• Study ideas that are offered seriously to check if they are visibly aligned to the targets, goals, and aspirations of the organization as a whole — and not only in tangible terms but also in the  qualitative aspects.
• Create an idea management system that pools together innovative thoughts so that they can be preserved. A seemingly irrelevant suggestion today may have significant value in the future.

Going About Systematic Innovation

Step One: One way of going about this is by first establishing ‘use’ cases. This can be achieved through keen observations of similar problems being tackled in different segments of the industry and coming up with ideas that can be transferred to your  specific scenario.

Step two: Develop a portfolio and focus only on the task at hand. Any unrelated ideas should be discarded for the time being and all energies should be focused on developing a practicable design for the idea.

Step three: Draw practical experiments on these designs. This will give rise to a working model and once a demo gains acceptance a commercial model can be developed to monetize the idea.

Another more modern way of setting out on innovation is: gauging the scope of a possible solution by looking at a problem or a possible problem your enterprise might have. This is different from the first way of approaching innovation because it doesn’t look for almost-constructed, existing solutions in a certain industry. The benefit of this approach is that the idea will almost certainly hold commercial interest. And it can be worked upon to bring out a product with targeted or mass appeal.