Source — Birtchnell, "All hail Jugaad? Understanding the latest management fad from India" (2012)
- Title: "All hail Jugaad? Understanding the latest management fad from India"
- Author: Thomas Birtchnell, Lecturer in Social Sciences, Media & Communication, University of Wollongong
- Publication: The Conversation
- Date: 2012-08-13
- URL: https://theconversation.com/all-hail-jugaad-understanding-the-latest-management-fad-from-india-8797
- Accessed: 2026-09-03
- Type: secondary (academic author, general-audience outlet); explicitly skeptical/critical stance toward the management-fad framing of jugaad.
Extract
Birtchnell traces jugaad's origin to "the slang term for the cobbled together vehicles driven by the rural poor" — the vehicle sense this project also finds independently in Wiktionary and Oxford Learner's Dictionaries (sources/wiktionary-jugaad.md; sources/oxfordlearnersdictionaries-jugaad.md) — before the word was generalized by management theorists. He cites Navi Radjou's own definition of the business-theory sense: "a form of innovation combining frugality with flexibility."
Safety critique: India has "the highest number of road fatalities a year in the world" (105,725 cited), and Birtchnell links jugaad-vehicle use to this toll (see also his own hospital-casualty study, independently reported via Wikipedia — sources/wikipedia-jugaad.md).
A direct negative-connotation claim: "jugaad is also slang for 'corruption,' and is too often the face of criminal activity" — an early (2012), non-academic-journal statement of the same corruption association later documented rigorously by Jauregui's 2014 ethnography (sources/jauregui-2014-jugaad-corruption-abstract.md).
Electricity theft: links jugaad practices to India's major 2012 power-grid blackouts, describing citizens who "steal it from their neighbour" through informal grid tampering.
A specific commercial-failure counter-example: the Tata Nano, marketed explicitly as a jugaad-innovation product, "ultimately underperformed" because its target low-income consumers preferred repairing their existing (used) vehicles to buying new ones — a documented case of the jugaad marketing frame not translating into the predicted market behavior.
Author's own conclusion: jugaad "should be applied with some caution, and is not necessarily a shining example of innovation for world business."
Gaps
- The 105,725 road-fatality figure's original source (Indian government data, presumably) is not given in the article as fetched.
- Written in 2012, before the bulk of the academic jugaad-corruption literature (Jauregui 2014 and later) — an early, not the most developed, statement of the critique.