Yi in partnership with CII and Hachette organized the 1st national learning series for the year 2015-16 on the topic, 'Frugal Innovation'. Wiki tells us that Frugal Innovation or Frugal Engineering is the process of reducing the complexity and cost of a good and its production. Usually this refers to removing nonessential features from a durable good, such as a car or phone, in order to sell it in developing countries. Designing products for such countries may also call for an increase in durability and, when selling the products, reliance on unconventional distribution channels. In the global business landscape, increasingly dened by trends such as the sharing economy and the maker movement, companies the world over are facing pressure from consumers, employees, and governments to create and deliver rst-rate, affordable and sustainable products and services using less energy, less capital and less time. This has led to the development of a new model for business success: FRUGAL INNOVATION or the ability to do more and better with less. Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu, Authors of the book 'FRUGAL INNOVATION – HOW TO DO BETTER WITH LESS' were the main speakers in this national learning series which also had senior industrialists and thought leaders join with them for panel discussion across the cities of New Delhi, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Coimbatore. In this seminal book on a revolutionary worldwide phenomenon, innovation experts Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu chronicle the rise of a frugal economy in the US, Europe and Japan and show how the world's top companies across sectors; American Express, Ford, GE, IBM, Levi Strauss, Marks & Spencer, Novartis, Pearson, PepsiCo, Renault-Nissan, Siemens and Unilever – are achieving great success by embedding frugality into their business models and corporate culture. By doing business faster, better and cheaper, these frugal pioneers have demonstrated how to tap into a trillion-dollar global market for sustainable products while realizing huge cost savings. Featuring over 50 case studies and identifying, for the rst time, the principles, perspectives and techniques behind frugal innovation, this inspiring and signicant book is Corporate India's guide to reclaiming global leadership in frugal innovation by generating greater economic and social value while minimizing the use of resources. 1 About the Authors Navi Radjou is an innovation and leadership strategist based in Silicon Valley. He is also a Fellow at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, and a World Economic Forum (WEF) faculty member. He is a member of WEF’s Global Agenda Council on Design Innovation and a regular columnist on Harvard Business Review. Navi is co-author of the international best-seller Jugaad Innovation. The Economist calls it “the most comprehensive book yet to appear on the subject” of frugal innovation. Navi is also co-author of From Smart To Wise,a book on next generation leadership. In 2013, Navi received the Thinkers50 Innovation Award — given to a management thinker who are 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. Till 2011, Navi served as the Executive Director of the Centre for India & Global Business at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, where Jaideep Prabhu was the Director. Prior to Cambridge, Radjou spent ten years in the US, primarily as Vice-President at Forrester Research, a leading US-based technology research and consulting rm. 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. At Forrester, he published more than a hundred thought leadership reports on business topics related to innovation and emerging markets. Based on his extensive eld research in India, he published in 2008 a ten-part report series titled “India: The Innovation Giant (Re)Awakens”, which explores the innovative business models pioneered by large corporations and grassroots entrepreneurs in India. 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 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 (Indus Entrepreneurs), Milken Institute, Asia Society, Harvard University, and MIT. For several consecutive years, he has served on the international panel of judges for The Economist’s Innovation Awards. In addition to regularly writing columns in Bloomberg Businessweekand The Wall Street Journal, Navi also blogs on HarvardBusinessReview.org. 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 rst- ever ranking of countries by their collaborative aptitude to integrate innovation capabilities across multiple regions – as ambitious and sophisticated. 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. An Indian-born French national, he earned his MS degree in information systems from EcoleCentrale Paris, and also attended the Yale School of Management 2 About the Authors Jaideep Prabhu is the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Business and Enterprise at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, England. The Professorship was established by the Government of India with an endowment of £3.2 million. Professor Prabhu is also the Director of the Centre for India & Global Business (CIGB), whose Executive Director was Navi Radjou. He is the co-author of Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth, described by The Economist as “the most comprehensive book” on the subject of frugal innovation. Jaideep Prabhu holds a BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and a PhD from the University of Southern California. He was Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California from 1995–96, Assistant Professor and Fellow at the Centre for Economic Research, Tilburg University from 1996–99 . He was Director of Studies at Fitzwilliam College and Clare College from 1999–2004 and University Lecturer, then University Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the then Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge from 2002–04. He was Innovation Fellow of the Advanced Institute of Management (AIM) from 2007–09. He was Professor of Marketing, Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London from 2004, becoming Director of Research 2007–08. He has been a Fellow of Clare College since 2009. His research interest in marketing strategy is specically related to innovation, organizational learning and competitive interaction. He teaches marketing strategy, marketing management, international marketing, brand management and high technology marketing. Jaideep Prabhu is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the International Journal of Research in Marketing and the Journal of Management Studies, and a member of the senior advisory board of the European Journal of Marketing. He has consulted for or taught executives from Barclays, Bertelsmann, BP, BT, GE, IBM, INGBank, the NHS, Nokia, Philips, Roche, Shell, Siemens, Vodafone and Xerox, among others. Opening remarks by the Authors Jaideep shared his experiences in the eld of Frugal Innovation by mentioning various researches which included understanding what innovation was to emerging economies, talking to grass root innovators and entrepreneurs and also by understanding the requirements of large domestic and multinational companies. Jaideep pointed out the difference in innovation contrast which was seen within the western counterparts. ‘People in west are more value conscious and are ready to pay more for any better value’ he mentioned. He also mentioned that in the US and across Europe, vertically integrated value chains controlled by large companies were already being challenged by new consumerorchestrated value ecosystems that allowed consumers to design, build, market, distribute and trade goods and services among themselves, eliminating the need for intermediaries. ‘This bottom-up approach to value creation is enabled by the horizontal (or peer-to-peer) networks and do-it-yourself (DIY) platforms that form the foundation of the “frugal” economy’, he said. Jaideep further explained the two different trends that were adopted in a frugal economy which 3 included ‘sharing’ and ‘making’. Sharing was to identify any unused resources that are held within and to provide the same for a use. ‘BlaBlaCar’ was explained as an example of sharing practice in frugal economy as they sell any additional seat left after a hiring it to any third party to make full use of the resource. Navi explained the structural