Abstract "Jugaad" — India's celebrated philosophy of frugal, improvisational problem-solving — has long been presented as one of the country's greatest entrepreneurial advantages. And at the early stage of a startup's life, it genuinely is. Founders who can build something functional from very little, who can find workarounds for broken systems, who can serve customers at a tenth of the cost that a Western competitor would need — these are real competitive skills. But this paper argues that Jugaad has a dark side that the entrepreneurship literature has largely ignored. At the scaling stage, the same improvisation that helped a startup survive starts to undermine its ability to grow. The quick fixes become permanent liabilities. The tribal knowledge becomes an institutional blind spot. The informal governance becomes a governance crisis waiting to happen. Drawing on published case evidence from BYJU'S and OYO Rooms, statistical data from India's startup ecosystem, and the broader academic literature on organizational learning and systemic innovation, this paper proposes a "Structured Frugality" framework — a way of keeping the cost efficiency and adaptability that Jugaad provides while building the process discipline that global-scale enterprises require. India will not become a genuine "Product Nation" until its startup culture learns to make this transition.
Richhariya et al. (Thu,) studied this question.