Navi Radjou


Navi Radjou is an Indian born scholar and an innovation and leadership advisor based in Silicon Valley. He is a Fellow of Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge and has spoken and written widely on the theme of frugal innovation.

Career

Radjou was born in India with French-American dual citizenship. He earned a diploma in technical studies from the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts in Paris, France and an MS degree in information systems from Ecole Centrale Paris. He started his career with IBM at its Toronto Software Lab and eventually served nearly ten years as Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, a US-based technology research and consulting firm. At Forrester, he investigated how globalised innovation – with the rise of India and China as both a source and market for innovations – is driving new market structures and organizational models called "Global Innovation Networks". During his tenure at Forrester, he advised senior executives around the world on technology-enabled best practices to drive collaborative innovation, global supply chain integration, and proactive customer service.
Till 2011, he served as the Executive Director of the Centre for India & Global Business at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, where Jaideep Prabhu was the director. Radjou is a Fellow at Judge Business School and a World Economic Forum faculty member. He is a member of WEF's Global Future Council on Innovation & Entrepreneurship. For several consecutive years, he has served on the international panel of judges for The Economist’s Innovation Awards. Navi also served as a judge for FastCompany's 2017 World Changing Ideas Awards.

Writing

At Forrester, Radjou published more than a hundred reports on business topics related to innovation and emerging markets. Based on his extensive field research in India he published in 2008 a ten-part report series titled "India: The Innovation Giant Awakens", which explores the innovative business models pioneered by large corporations and grassroots entrepreneurs in India.
Radjou is co-author of Frugal Innovation published worldwide by The Economist in 2015. The book explains the principles, perspectives and techniques behind frugal innovation. He is also co-author of the international best-seller Jugaad Innovation. described by The Economist as "the most comprehensive book yet to appear on the subject" of frugal innovation. He is co-author of From Smart To Wise, a book on next generation leadership. He is also a regular columnist on Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg Businessweek and The Wall Street Journal, and maintains a blog on HarvardBusinessReview.org.
Navi's next book, Conscious Society: Reinventing How We Consume, Work, and Live, shows how we can all expand our awareness and tap into our abundant inner-resources—love, ingenuity, wisdom—to co-create inclusive and sustainable communities. In doing so, we can consciously steer human evolution to a better future.

Speaking

Radjou frequently acts as a keynote speaker and is widely quoted in international media. In 2014, Navi delivered a talk at TED Global on frugal innovation, which has received over 1,5 million video views.
He is a frequent speaker to senior executive groups and has spoken on the topics of innovation and globalisation at leading conferences organised by the World Economic Forum, Council on Foreign Relations, The Conference Board, TiE, Milken Institute, Asia Society, Harvard University, and MIT.

Awards and recognition

Radjou has had wide exposure in national and international media, including The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, Financial Times, Le Monde, and Nikkei Shimbun. He is ranked as one of the 50 most influential persons shaping innovation in France.
In 2013, he received the Thinkers50 Innovation Award — given to a management thinker who is re-shaping the way we think about and practice innovation. In addition, his book Jugaad Innovation was shortlisted for the 2013 Thinkers50 CK Prahalad Breakthrough Idea Award.
Named by BusinessWeek as an "expert in corporate innovation," he was also honoured by the Financial Times, which called his co-authored work on National Innovation Networks – the first-ever ranking of countries by their collaborative aptitude to integrate innovation capabilities across multiple regions – as "ambitious" and "sophisticated". His latest research on "polycentric innovation" – a new approach that multinationals can use to integrate globally distributed R&D and innovation capabilities – has been featured in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Global Intelligence for the CIO, and Le Monde. Similarly, his concept of "indovation" — the unique process by which innovations are developed in India to serve a large number of people sustainably — has been featured in The Financial Times and in several conferences organised by Asia Society.

Criticism

Radjou and his co-authors’ work on jugaad has been criticized by Indian academics and scientists such as Rishikesha Krishnan, Vijay Govindarajan, Anil Gupta, and RA Mashelkar who believe the practice of jugaad can lead only to makeshift solutions that are unsafe, unscalable, and unsustainable.
Radjou addressed this criticism in an article in Thinkers magazine arguing that jugaad isn’t intrinsically good or bad. Jugaad is a creative mindset: it is the intention of the person using this ingenious mindset that determines the quality of the outcome.