Name: 【TED】Navi Radjou: Creative problem-solving in the face of extreme limits (Navi Radjou: Creative problem-solving in the face of extreme limits)
Uploaded: 2015-02-03T09:32:28.000Z
Duration: 16 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When you grow up in a developing country
like India, as I did,

Adverbs of manner

you instantly learn to get more value
from limited resources

and find creative ways to reuse
what you already have.

Take Mansukh Prajapati,
a potter in India.

He has created a fridge
made entirely of clay

He can keep fruits and vegetables
fresh for many days.

In Africa, if you run out of
your cell phone battery, don't panic.

You will find some
resourceful entrepreneurs

who can recharge your 
cell phone using bicycles.

that receives only one inch
of rainfall each year.

An engineering college in Lima
designed a giant advertising billboard

that absorbs air humidity
and converts it into purified water,

generating over 90 liters
of water every day.

They can literally create
water out of thin air.

I have met and studied
hundreds of entrepreneurs

in India, China, Africa and South America,
and they keep amazing me.

Because they don't have the kind
of basic resources we take for granted,

and basic services
like healthcare and education

When external resources are scarce,
you have to go within yourself

to tap the most abundant
resource, human ingenuity,

and use that ingenuity to find clever ways
to solve problems with limited resources.

that means an improvised fix,
a clever solution born in adversity.

Jugaad solutions are not
sophisticated or perfect,

but they create more value at lower cost.

For me, the entrepreneurs
who will create Jugaad solutions

They can magically transform
adversity into opportunity,

and turn something of less value
into something of high value.

In other words, they mastered the art
of doing more with less,

which is the essence of frugal innovation.

Frugal innovation is the ability 
to create more economic and social value

Frugal innovation is not about making do;
it's about making things better.

Now I want to show you how,
across emerging markets,

entrepreneurs and companies are adopting 
frugal innovation on a larger scale

to cost-effectively deliver healthcare
and energy to billions of people

who may have little income
but very high aspirations.

where the country's largest
I.T. service provider, Neusoft,

to help doctors in cities
remotely treat old and poor patients

This solution is based on
simple-to-use medical devices

that less qualified health workers
like nurses can use in rural clinics.

China desperately needs
these frugal medical solutions

because by 2050 it will be home
to over half a billion senior citizens.

a country where half the population
uses M-Pesa, a mobile payment solution.

This is a great solution
for the African continent

because 80 percent of Africans
don't have a bank account,

but what is exciting is that M-Pesa
is now becoming the source

of other disruptive business models
in sectors like energy.

Take M-KOPA, the home solar solution
that comes literally in a box

that has a solar rooftop panel,
three LED lights,

The whole kit, though, costs 200 dollars,
which is too expensive for most Kenyans,

and this is where mobile telephony
can make the solution more affordable.

Today, you can buy this kit by making
an initial deposit of just 35 dollars,

and then pay off the rest by making
a daily micro-payment of 45 cents

Once you've made 365 micro-payments,
the system is unlocked,

and you own the product and you start 
receiving clean, free electricity.

where 70 percent of people
live off the grid.

what matters is that you take what is
most abundant, mobile connectivity,

to deal with what is scarce,
which is energy.

With frugal innovation,
the global South is actually catching up

and in some cases 
even leap-frogging the North.

Instead of building expensive hospitals,
China is using telemedicine

to cost-effectively treat
millions of patients,

and Africa, instead of building
banks and electricity grids,

is going straight to mobile payments
and distributed clean energy.

Frugal innovation is diametrically opposed
to the way we innovate in the North.

where we keep chasing
the next big technology thing.

Companies in the West spend
billions of dollars investing in R&D,

and use tons of natural resources
to create ever more complex products,

to differentiate their brands
from competition,

and they charge customers
more money for new features.

So the conventional business model 
in the West is more for more.

But sadly, this more for more model
is running out of gas, for three reasons:

First, a big portion
of customers in the West

because of the diminishing
purchasing power,

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【TED】Navi Radjou: Creative problem-solving in the face of extreme limits (Navi Radjou: Creative problem-solving in the face of extreme limits)

create

exist

energy

innovation