Navi Radjou is a French-American scholar in innovation and leadership 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 bestseller of the same name, Jugaad Innovation (over 100,000 copies sold worldwide), 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 socio-economic and ecological value at a lower cost.

Throughout the two decades 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 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 digital economy shaped by climate change. It won the CMI Management Book of the Year 2016 Award. Navi is also co-author of From Smart To Wise: Acting and Leading With Wisdom, a book on next generation leadership that CEO coach Marshall Goldsmith calls “fascinating” and PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi views as “a practical guide for accelerating your own wise leadership development.”

His next book, Conscious Society: Reinventing How We Consume, Work, and Live (published in 2018), draws on Eastern wisdom traditions (Vedanta, Taoism, Buddhism) and Western sciences to show how business leaders, policy makers, nonprofit and citizen groups can expand their (self) awareness and tap into abundant inner resources—love, ingenuity, wisdom—to co-build inclusive, healthy, and sustainable communities that seek to maximize the well-being and potential of everyone.

In 2013 Navi 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 1.6 million video 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, 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 firms—including E&Y, GM, Fujitsu, IBM, Microsoft, P&G, SAP, and TCS. He serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Innovation & Entrepreneurship.

His work has been featured on NPR, BBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Financial Times. He regularly writes in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review and strategy+business. A widely sought-after keynote speaker, 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 Pondicherry, 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. He is a lifelong student of Yoga, Ayurveda, and Buddhist (Vipassana) meditation.

Dr. Simone Ahuja is the principal of Blood Orange, a marketing and strategy advisory boutique with digital media capabilities, and special expertise in innovation. Headquartered in Minneapolis with teams in Mumbai, Blood Orange uses an agile and cost efficient content production framework built upon principles learned through extensive work in India, including "jugaad". Simone recently developed and produced the television series, Indique--Big Ideas from Emerging India for which she explored how innovation within India drives socio-economic development. The series was created based on extensive on the ground research and academic research conducted in partnership with the Centre for India & Global Business at the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School. This research, along with her personal experience in leveraging the complementary skill sets of transnational teams, and meetings with CEOs of multinational corporations as well as grassroots entrepreneurs heralding bottom-up, small scale innovation gave her a holistic, on-the-ground look at the methods and mindset of innovation employed in emerging markets, and its relevance in a global context.

Simone has served as an advisor to the Centre for India & Global Business at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge and as an Associate Fellow for the Asia Society, NYC. She provides advisory services and keynote presentations to trade delegations, academic institutions, and Fortune 100 companies including Pepsi Co, Procter & Gamble, Honeywell, General Mills, ECOLAB, Colgate-Palmolive and Best Buy Corp. She regularly contributes to a Harvard Business Review blog on HBR.org. Her upcoming book, Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth, co-authored with Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu and published by Jossey Bass, is due out in the US in April, 2012.

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