Chapter Five

Principle Four

Keep It Simple

I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

Dr. Sathya Jeganathan is a pediatrician in Chengalpattu Government Medical College, a rural hospital in South India. Infant mortality used to run high at her hospital: on average, 39 out of every 1,000 infants died at birth. This statistic, unfortunately, did not differ greatly from overall neonatal mortality rates in India where, of the roughly 26 million children born each year, 1.2 million die during their first four weeks of life.¹

Wishing to decrease infant mortality in her hospital, Dr. Jeganathan first tried to import incubators made in the West. But she soon found the setup cost of these incubators prohibitively high, and the staff and maintenance needed to operate the equipment unsuited to rural India. Undeterred, she applied some jugaad thinking. She decided to design her own incubator, one that was simple, inexpensive, and easy to use. Teaming up with neonatal nurses and local electricians, Dr. Jeganathan developed a minimalist incubator from a wooden table made of locally harvested wood, a Plexiglas top, and standard 100-watt light bulbs (rather than radiant coils) to maintain the baby's temperature. Thanks to its simple design, the incubator cost only $100 to build and was easy to maintain.

Once Dr. Jeganathan had the first working prototype of the incubator constructed and implemented in her hospital, infant mortality was cut by half. Now she is working closely with the Lemelson Foundation, a U.S.–based organization that supports entrepreneurs in emerging markets, to fine-tune and rescale her invention so it can be distributed across other rural hospitals in India.²

U.S. lawmakers seeking to address America's health care crisis might find Dr. Jeganathan's incubator story interesting. U.S. medical device makers spend billions of R&D dollars trying to push the frontiers of science and technology—only to come up with highly expensive and complex equipment that requires highly trained technicians to operate. In the process, these device makers often forget the basic needs of end users. After all, why make things simple when they can use their R&D dollars to make them more complicated? High-end incubators sold in the West, like those Jeganathan originally sought to buy, have many high-tech features and can cost up to $20,000. Yet they meet the same fundamental need as Dr. Jeganathan's ingeniously simple $100 machine: they keep babies warm.

In this chapter, we look at how jugaad innovators like Dr. Jeganathan are at the forefront of a low-tech revolution devoted to finding “good enough” solutions. Rather than offering overengineered products, jugaad innovators in emerging markets offer products that are easy to use and maintain and address customers' fundamental needs. By designing for the most basic universal needs, jugaad innovators appeal to a wider spectrum of consumers and thus dominate the sectors they operate in.

In contrast, Western companies have long embraced a “bigger is better” approach to innovation. However, consumers are increasingly put off by the complexity of technology, especially in products like consumer electronics and automobiles that they encounter daily. More important, Western consumers across income levels are “downshifting”—opting for a simpler, more meaningful life. Western companies who respond now to these consumer and societal changes are likely to benefit in the long run. In this chapter, we discuss how some forward-thinking companies like Google, Facebook, GE, General Motors, Siemens, and Philips are leading this response by building simplicity into their products and services—as well as into their organizational design—and, in the process, creating deep and lasting relationships with consumers.

The Practical Benefits of Simplicity

Jugaad innovators find success in emerging markets by pursuing simplicity in the products and services they offer. They are motivated to do so because this allows them to develop quick yet effective solutions for consumers grappling with complexity in their daily lives.

Simple products offer three advantages to jugaad innovators:

• They are cheaper to make—and therefore more affordable. Resources in emerging markets are scarce and expensive. Simple products—with fewer features—require fewer resources and are therefore easier and cheaper to produce and deliver. Jugaad innovators can pass on these savings to customers in the form of lower prices, making simpler products more affordable and thus more successful in the marketplace.
• They are easier to install and maintain. Emerging markets face a lack of skilled workers to install and maintain complex products. For example, in India, 26 percent of adults are illiterate and therefore cannot read basic instruction manuals, let alone complicated ones. The limited availability of skilled workers means that companies cannot create highly engineered products that require skilled staff to set up and maintain.
• They can satisfy a wider audience. Emerging market customers are diverse in their needs and in their ability to use and maintain products. To reach as wide an audience as possible, jugaad innovators are compelled to design products that take into account the buying power, literacy, and technical aptitude of the least able members of the population. Designing simple products is the key to achieving universal appeal across diverse groups.

The Art of Simplicity

Jugaad innovators in emerging markets rely on several strategies to design products that are simple to use and maintain. To begin with, they focus more on customers' needs than on their desires. They employ a functional approach to product and service design and try to develop practical solutions that address well-defined customer needs. They are not in the business of coming up with cool features that appeal to customers' wants. Instead, jugaad innovators aim to make and deliver a good enough solution with limited functionality rather than one with a dazzling array of features.

For instance, to address the high cost of electricity in Filipino slums, Illac Diaz invented an ingeniously simple solution: Isang Litrong Liwanag (A Liter of Light), is a scheme that brings an eco-friendly solar bottle bulb to underprivileged communities across the Philippines. The solar bottle bulb (SLB) is simply a recycled plastic bottle filled with bleach-treated water (to prevent formation of mold) that is fitted snugly into a hole in the corrugated roof of makeshift homes in shantytowns. The water in the bottle refracts the sun's rays producing the equivalent of a 55-watt light bulb. An SLB produces more light than a conventional window might let in. And, unlike windows, the bulb doesn't break or leak during the typhoon season. The SLB is made from recyclable materials; is very easy to assemble, install, and maintain; and helps create new jobs in underdeveloped communities, as slum dwellers can now work in their normally dark homes during the day. More important, an SLB can be installed for just $1.³ Diaz's vision is to deploy SLBs in one million homes across the Philippines by the end of 2012.⁴

Jugaad innovators like Diaz don't try to guess what would make their products simple by sitting in an R&D lab. Rather, they spend a great deal of time with customers in their natural setting to observe and identify what would make a product or service easier for them to use. Nokia, for example, employs ethnographers who spend long periods of time living with customers in emerging markets to understand their latent needs. In one case, Nokia's ethnographers studied migrant workers in Indian slums, the shantytowns of Ghana, and the favelas of Brazil to figure out how technology could make their lives easier. They were humbled to discover that regular cellphones were too expensive, flashy, and complex for slum-dwellers to buy and use and that the devices couldn't withstand the dusty, no-electricity environment where these people worked and lived. Armed with this insight, Nokia's researchers set out to develop a simple solution that would blend into the lives of these target users. The result was the Nokia 1100, a rugged cellphone with a minimalist design that allows calling and texting, withstands dust, and can be recharged within a few minutes. When Nokia's researchers noticed that many of these customers use their cellphone's bright screen as a light source, they included a flashlight in the 1100 design—making it very popular among, for example, truck drivers in Asia and Africa who use it to repair their vehicles at night. The Nokia 1100 was launched in 2003 and became an immediate hit: it appealed to not only low-income consumers but even middle-class users looking for an uncomplicated cellphone. The Nokia 1100 has sold 250 million units around the world, making it the best-selling cellphone ever.⁵ Foreign Policy magazine calls the Nokia 1100 “the most important cellphone on the planet.”⁶

When creating simple products that meet the immediate needs of their customers, jugaad innovators typically design them from the ground up. They avoid “defeaturing”—a practice often pursued by Western multinationals, which involves taking products designed for affluent Western consumers, stripping them of nonessential features, and then selling them at somewhat lower prices to consumers in emerging markets. These defeatured products typically fail in emerging markets because they are not fundamentally designed to take into account the inherent constraints of the local markets' socioeconomic context.

For instance, many Western tech giants like Intel, Microsoft, and HP, as well as academic institutions like MIT, have tried to build a low-cost PC for emerging nations.⁷ But none of these projects has succeeded because these PCs were either too complex to use or too expensive to buy, or they failed to meet specific local requirements. On October 5, 2011, however, Kapil Sibal, the Indian minister of communications and information technology, launched a $60 tablet (promoted as “the world's cheapest tablet”) that was ideally designed to meet local requirements.⁸ Called the Aakash (“sky” in Sanskrit), it was developed by DataWind, a UK-based tech startup, in partnership with several leading Indian technical universities, with local needs and constraints in mind.⁹ The initial market for the Aakash will be students—from primary schools all the way to universities—who will receive the first ten thousand units at the subsidized price of $35 per unit. The Aakash boasts a simplified user interface and is preloaded with educational software developed in local languages.

The Aakash clearly cannot match the computing power or the features of Apple's iPad (which costs $500) or Amazon's Kindle Fire (priced at $200). However, it was designed with a different set of users in mind—Indian students, who needed a simple and practical computing device. The Aakash meets those needs very well. First, it provides basic capabilities students need, like web browsing, video, Wi-Fi, and word processing software. Second, the Aakash runs on Google Android and other open-source technologies, which are cheaper and easier to maintain than proprietary technologies. Third, the Aakash comes with a solar charging option, a huge advantage in many parts of India where the electricity supply is either nonexistent or unreliable. Fourth, the Aakash touchscreen makes it easier for students to navigate educational content and makes learning more intuitive and fun. In sum, the Aakash is simple. It is part of the Indian government's broader initiative to extend broadband access to twenty-five thousand colleges and four hundred universities across India. Given its simplicity and affordability, the Aakash has the potential to become a runaway success, not only in Indian schools but also in academic institutions abroad. Even U.S.–based experts who tested the Aakash in their labs gave it rave reviews.¹⁰

It is worth pointing out that jugaad innovators infuse simplicity into not only how they design products but also how they interact with customers, from the sale of their products and services to their delivery and after-sales support. Such service innovation—that is, innovation in the way jugaad innovators interact with customers, deliver services to them, or use technology to support them—is crucial to simplifying and enriching the user experience throughout the solution's lifecycle. In particular, many jugaad entrepreneurs who sell products to the base of the economic pyramid in emerging markets rely on a grassroots network of distributors and technicians who make it easier for customers in villages to learn more about a product, get it installed quickly, and have it maintained without hassle. For example, SELCO, introduced earlier as a company that provides solar lighting to over 125,000 Indian village homes, relies on a vast network of grassroots entrepreneurs who install and repair SELCO's solar lanterns on very short notice—even in the most far-flung villages.

Finally, jugaad innovators ensure that their solutions are simple but not simplistic. There is an important distinction between the two. Jugaad innovators follow Albert Einstein's exhortation to “make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” In other words, jugaad innovators don't necessarily try to simplify the nature of the problem the customer is facing. Doing so runs the risk of producing simplistic solutions, ones that may appear simple in the short term but prove ineffective in the long run. Instead, jugaad innovators often embrace complexity but mask it from customers by giving them a simple user interface. In other words, rather than simplifying the problem the customer is facing, jugaad innovators often simplify the use of the solution. As a result, they produce robust and resilient solutions that address users' complex needs, comprehensively and sustainably.

For instance, Ushahidi, which originated in Kenya, is a simple solution that relies on mobile SMS (text messaging) to coordinate grassroots responses to cataclysmic events like hurricanes, earthquakes, or epidemic outbreaks. According to the company website, the Ushahidi platform enables “the gathering [of] crisis information from the general public [and] provides new insights into events happening in near real-time”—in the aftermath of, say, an earthquake.¹¹ Via text messages, the general public can learn—and inform others—where food and medical supplies are located, and receive SMS alerts when missing persons have been found. Within hours of a cataclysmic event, Ushahidi can help coordinate relief efforts in a highly targeted fashion: medical supplies and food can be dispatched precisely to those locations that need them the most, based on real-time information gathered by thousands of people at the scene. Contrast this with the traditional hit-or-miss relief management approach that is onerous and time-consuming: as relief workers lack precise information on which specific locations need help the most, they plan their relief efforts in a top-down fashion and take a scattershot approach to distributing food and supplies. Ushahidi has been used successfully to rapidly and optimally coordinate relief efforts in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. It was also used by the Washington Post to map out blocked roads and other information in the wake of the winter storms that hit Washington, DC in 2010.¹²

The problems Ushahidi is trying to solve are overwhelmingly complex, such as helping people affected by an earthquake or tsunami rapidly locate the food and medical supplies they need. Traditional crisis management tools tend to tackle such huge problems only superficially or partially because the tools are too simplistic, as explained earlier. But Ushahidi is able to address complex issues like disaster management in their full depth and breadth with relative ease—thanks to an elegantly simple, user-friendly, yet comprehensive bottom-up solution that leverages the power of crowdsourcing.

The Backlash Against Complexity

The trend toward simplicity is also growing quickly in the West. Although Western technology is more developed and Western consumers are more sophisticated and affluent than their counterparts in emerging markets, there are several reasons why Western companies may benefit from keeping things simple:

• Customers are clamoring for simplicity. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Western customers are increasingly overwhelmed by technology-driven complexity. For instance, 65 percent of Americans complain that they “have lost interest in purchasing a technology product because it seemed too complex to set up or operate.”¹³ Similarly, having overindulged in technology in the past two decades, Fortune 500 companies now want simpler IT systems that are affordable and easy to deploy and maintain. These technology-jaded users now increasingly equate simplicity with sanity.
• Generations Y and Z and baby boomers are rebuffing advanced technologies. The members of generations Y and Z, who are willing to trade high pay for flexibility and work/life balance, also eschew complex offerings in favor of simplicity. For instance, a study at Stanford University found that a majority of graduate students actually prefer the average-quality MP3 version of a song played on their iPods to the high-quality CD version, even though the latter is technically superior.¹⁴ Similarly, large numbers of retiring baby boomers—confronted with health issues such as deteriorating eyesight and arthritis—are put off by complex consumer electronic devices that have too many features and are too complicated to use.
• More citizens in the West are downshifting their lifestyles. A grassroots cultural movement known as voluntary simplicity is growing across the US.¹⁵ The movement calls for voluntary practices such as reducing one's material possessions or increasing self-sufficiency in order to achieve a simpler, richer, and more meaningful quality of life. Studies show that 15 to 28 percent of Americans have already voluntarily adopted simplified lifestyles.¹⁶
• Overengineered products cost a lot of R&D money and time. In a time of scarcity, Western companies can no longer afford to invest lavishly in R&D to come up with complex products bloated with features that require lengthy development cycles. As a result, several Fortune 500 companies are slashing their R&D budgets (which amounted to a whopping $550 billion in 2010), reducing their products to a more rational number, and simplifying their product development processes to gain in efficiency and speed.¹⁷
• Nimble rivals are stealing market share using simplicity. Visionary companies such as Google and Facebook are democratizing technology by making it simple and accessible—and thereby stealing market share from technology rivals who produce overengineered, counterintuitive products. Similarly, business software companies like SAP and Oracle face competition from cloud computing vendors like salesforce.com, which simplify the lives of tech buyers by reducing all the headaches associated with expensive software upgrades.

“Why Make It Simple When We Can Make It Complex?”

Despite growing evidence that consumers want simplicity in the products and services they buy—and despite the fact that overengineering products is no longer sustainable, as R&D budgets are increasingly being slashed in the West—many Western companies nevertheless find it hard to make simplicity a key tenet of their product development and commercialization processes. There are several reasons for this.

First, Western companies often believe that customers aren't willing to pay a premium for products unless these products are loaded with features and functions. Specifically, the fear of losing the power to charge high prices and earn high margins makes companies shy away from simplicity.

A second, related reason is that complexity has been lucrative in the past. “New, improved” versions of products and services have allowed Western companies to differentiate their new offerings from their own (and other companies') existing ones. That has helped companies convince customers to keep upgrading—or replacing—existing products with ever more complex ones. This in turn has helped companies secure growth and a steady stream of revenues as well.

Third, Western companies are often stuck in an endless innovation war with each other: a perpetual battle of one-upmanship, with each company forced to out-innovate others in order to convince shareholders and customers that they are still “in the game.”

Fourth, companies don't always design products with end users in mind. In his book The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, declares that it's high time we “humanize technology.”¹⁸ Currently technology development is anything but human-centric. Many of the features in new products are determined not by deep customer observation but by the guesswork of R&D and marketing teams, driven by their desire to create a better version than the last one, often regardless of whether it adds value for the consumer or not.¹⁹

Finally, innovation metrics in Western companies—such as the number of patents filed each year and the percentage of revenues dedicated to R&D—currently measure and reward cleverness, not customer value. The value of a product should not be measured by the number of patents associated with it.²⁰ Rather, it should be measured by the experiential value it delivers to end users. For many users, the best experience is a simple, seamless one. Yet most Western companies continue to use the number of patents they file as a key yardstick to measure how innovative they are.

Shifting the emphasis from R&D-driven complexity to customer-valued simplicity, however, will require companies to make some fundamental changes in the way they develop products.

How to Simplify Your Products—and Your Organization

Pursuing complexity for its own sake is increasingly self-defeating. Not only are customers moving away from complexity and toward simplicity in products and lifestyle, but R&D costs are high and rising, so pursuing complexity is an increasingly expensive proposition for companies. In such a context, it would be wise for Western business leaders to go back to the drawing board and find ways to enshrine simplicity into their value propositions and business models. The following strategies may help Western companies respond to the new economic reality by placing simplicity at the heart of what they do.

Redesign the Entire Organization Around Simplicity

Western companies cannot design simple products while keeping their business operations complex. For instance, a customer may love the ease of use of a firm's products but hate the convoluted sales process she has to go through to buy the product. Companies must therefore simplify every interaction with their customers throughout the product lifecycle—from the initial purchase to the actual use and even to the product's disposal—by streamlining not only their R&D and manufacturing but also their sales and customer service processes.

One company that has done just that is the electronics giant Philips, headquartered in Amsterdam. In fact, the company redesigned its entire organization—from R&D to manufacturing to customer support—to serve customers better, using the simplicity principle. This process began in the early 2000s when Philips received a big shock following the results of a piece of market research it had commissioned. For more than a hundred years, the company had built a reputation for exceptional technical performance, one that has yielded market-shaping inventions such as the compact tape cassette and compact disc. Yet the two thousand consumers it surveyed globally were now telling Philips that technical superiority wasn't what drove them to buy an electronics product. If anything, consumers felt intimidated by the growing complexity of technology: 30 percent of home-networking products were returned, as users didn't know how to set them up; and nearly 50 percent of people postponed their decision to buy a digital camera, deterred by its complexity.²¹ As Stefano Marzano, CEO and chief creative director of Philips Design, observes: “People are ready for unobtrusive technology.”²²

Sensing an opportunity, Philips' management team decided to reinvent its entire organization around simplicity—from the inside out. The conglomerate pruned its portfolio of businesses from five hundred to seventy and reduced the number of divisions from seventy to five. It simplified customer service so end users got the same experience, irrespective of the Philips business they were dealing with. Philips even extended simplicity to its corporate communications: no PowerPoint presentation was allowed to exceed ten slides, and all its annual reports since 2009 have been made available only online. In a way, Philips embraced voluntary simplicity as a new organizational principle.²³

By first internalizing simplicity and then actively living it, Philips was able to authentically engage customers in a discussion about simplicity. The company launched a rebranding campaign themed “Sense and Simplicity”—which has since become its corporate motto.²⁴ It even set up a Simplicity Advisory Board made up of five leading global experts in healthcare, lifestyle, and technology to help the company deliver on its “Sense and Simplicity” promise.²⁵ It began to proactively infuse the end user's perspective into every aspect of new product development, from ideation to prototyping and even packaging. For instance, Philips' R&D team quickly redesigned the packaging for a new flat-screen TV so the TV could be removed from a carton lying horizontally—a decision made after pilot users struggled to pull the heavy set out of an upright box.²⁶ In recent years, Philips has launched a steady stream of user-friendly products that have won rave reviews from customers and industry experts for their ability to marry simplicity and performance. In 2011, Philips bagged a record twenty-eight iF product design awards for its new products that seamlessly marry advanced technologies, sustainability, and a consumer-friendly design. These products included the Daily Duo vacuum cleaner and the Econova LED TV.²⁷

Distill Customer Needs to Their Bare Essence—and Design Simple Products Around Them

Simplicity advocates insist that “user-centric design” boosts the ease of use of products and services. Although this is true, it is important to remember that the urgency of customer needs varies widely. Western companies should zero in on consumers' most acute need (or pain point) and build a solution around that need above all others. A master of this approach was Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. Jobs elevated simplicity to an iconic status in computing. In many ways, Jobs was the Michelangelo of the digital age: he could take a piece of hardware, chip away the nonessential pieces, and design wonderfully simple-looking products like the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. In a rare interview, Jobs once told BusinessWeek: “Innovation emerges when saying no to thousands of things to ensure that we do not take the wrong path or try to do too much.”²⁸

Design Simple Offerings from the Ground Up

Rather than stripping down existing high-end products—that is, defeaturing them—companies need to design and build products from the ground up so they truly embody the spirit of simplicity. This not only appeals to customers but also helps reduce costs and helps companies come up with more long-lasting breakthroughs in their innovation process.

One company that has learned the ineffectiveness of defeaturing the hard way is Siemens AG. Headquartered in Germany, Siemens is a global powerhouse in electronics and electrical engineering, operating in the industry, energy, and health care sectors. Founded by an engineer in 1847, Siemens employs around 30,100 researchers who come up with about forty inventions each working day. It holds a total of 57,900 patents and filed 4,300 patents in 2010 alone.²⁹ Siemens sells highly engineered products—ranging from power generators to high-speed trains to MRI machines to wind turbines—to business users ranging from small to large enterprises as well as local and national governments. Siemens competes head-to-head with GE worldwide across all its businesses.

Seeking to escape the recessionary economic climate in the West, Siemens has been aggressively expanding in the booming emerging markets, and especially in Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Over the last five years Siemens has more than doubled its sales in emerging markets; these markets now account for 30 percent of the company's global sales revenues.³⁰ Siemens's initial go-to-market strategy in emerging countries consisted of stripping down its existing Western products—such as its expensive and overengineered MRI machines and power turbines—and adapting them to local requirements. But this “product localization” strategy didn't sit too well with clients in emerging markets who complained that these localized products were still too costly and complicated to use and maintain. As Armin Bruck, managing director of Siemens's Indian subsidiary acknowledges: “Entry-level users want simple user interfaces. They do not need or appreciate bells and whistles.”³¹ This market reality led Peter Löscher, Siemens's global CEO, to recognize that his company's products required a different kind of innovation in emerging markets. “What counts here [in emerging markets] is simplicity, not sophistication,” he notes.³²

In 2005, the financial and labor constraints of emerging markets led Siemens to come up with a bold new product strategy called SMART, which stands for Simple, Maintenance-friendly, Affordable, Reliable, and Timely-to-Market. Siemens defines SMART as finding new ways to use old technologies and developing solutions that are “good enough” for an initial market segment, while allowing them to be improved. Besides cost-effectiveness, the SMART philosophy emphasizes ease of setup, operation, and maintenance.³³ As Armin Bruck points out: “Our new [SMART] product initiative has been set up to design simple products to meet the entry-level requirements [of emerging markets].”³⁴

SMART products are being designed cost-effectively from the ground up in emerging economies such as India and China, using entirely local R&D talent that owns end-to-end responsibility for developing these products. The Chinese R&D team, for instance, has produced low-cost medical equipment like X-ray machines that can easily be deployed and operated by hospitals in small Chinese towns where skilled technicians are hard to find. Similarly, Siemens's R&D engineers in India are developing small local power grids that can use multiple sources of energy—from solar to coconut shells—to supply electricity to a typical Indian village of fifty to one hundred households. These micro power plants can be set up easily and require limited maintenance.³⁵ Siemens estimates the market potential for SMART products in India alone to be about €12 billion (US$15.6 billion).³⁶

Siemens currently employs 15,500 R&D engineers across emerging markets, many of whom are involved in SMART product development projects. Over 150 products have already been generated in the SMART category since its launch in 2005. In India alone, Siemens has over sixty SMART products in the pipeline and plans to launch half of them in 2012.³⁷ The company finds that by designing SMART products from the ground up in emerging markets it can save 20 to 40 percent in development costs, compared to adapting or locally producing products designed in the West. Although SMART products are positioned as entry-level products in Siemens' global product portfolio, they are highly profitable. Thanks in part to SMART products, Siemens generated €22 billion (US$28.7 billion) in revenues from entry-level markets in fiscal 2010, double the amount it earned in fiscal 2005. Entry-level markets now account for 30 percent of Siemens's total global revenues—up from 20 percent in 2005.³⁸ Even better, Siemens intends to sell these entry-level SMART products to recession-weary customers in the United States and Europe who are looking for simple and affordable solutions. For instance, Siemens's Indian engineers—in partnership with German engineers—have developed Fetal Heart Monitor, a device that monitors the heartbeat of fetuses in the womb. This device uses simple but ingenious microphone technology instead of expensive ultrasound. As such, the device holds great market potential in both emerging and developed economies.³⁹

Embrace the Universal Design Philosophy to Boost the Usability of Offerings

Universal design is a philosophy that celebrates humanity's diversity and exhorts companies to design products that are usable by as many people as possible.⁴⁰ Examples of universal design include buildings with access for all instead of a separate entrance for those with disabilities, unisex facilities where both men and women have a place to attend to a child's needs, and graphics on signs that can be recognized and understood by anyone regardless of language.

OXO, the consumer product company, is one of America's most ardent corporate advocates of universal design. Over time, OXO has built a well-deserved reputation for simplicity, and the company offers products that are both technically superior and easy to use. How does OXO pull it off? It zeroes in on the essence of the problem shared by a large number of customers across demographic segments and then designs user-friendly products that precisely meet customers' latent needs. This approach has helped OXO produce many best-selling products whose simplicity appeals to a wider audience—including kitchenware such as a salad spinner that can be used with one hand, liquid measuring cups that can be read from above without bending over, and kettles with whistle lids that open automatically when tipped to pour.⁴¹ OXO even applied its universal design thinking to develop an easy-to-use syringe for patients of all ages with rheumatoid arthritis who struggle to administer self-injections.⁴²

Get Engineers and Industrial Designers to Work Together

Bringing down the Berlin Wall may have been easier than dismantling the mental wall that keeps technology-enamored engineers and user-centered designers separate. Yet that mental wall must be torn down in order to achieve a proper balance between complex function and simple design. Companies must recognize that incorporating simplicity up front during the product conceptualization phase is several times more cost-effective than doing it as an afterthought in the later stages of the development process. Recognizing this fact, forward-thinking companies such as Google and Facebook encourage engineers and designers to work in cross-functional teams from the very start to ensure that performance is not sacrificed for the sake of simplicity—and vice-versa. At Facebook, for instance, communication and product designers, engineers, writers, and researchers all work together in multidisciplinary teams that create new product features with a shared goal: keep improving the user experience without sacrificing simplicity (see the detailed case study on Facebook later in this chapter).

Simplify Product Architectures and Reuse Platforms Across Products

R&D engineers are like craftsmen: they often like to create their own technologies or components from scratch, even if comparable technologies or components are readily available in the market. But this “reinvent the wheel” approach often leads to long product development cycles and results in expensive, overengineered products. In a resource-constrained economy, however, it is vital to reuse readily available components to make “good enough” products that get the job done. One way to do that is to simplify product architectures and reuse similar parts across multiple products in a portfolio.

Mary Barra is attempting to do exactly that at General Motors (GM). Barra, the highest-ranking female executive in GM's history, is in charge of design and engineering for all GM cars worldwide. Her boss, Dan Akerson, GM's CEO, has given her a tough assignment: shave several months off GM's three- to four-year-long product development cycle, reduce development and production costs by 25 percent, and make every GM car look cool and appealing. Barra is tackling this herculean task with gusto, weeding out complexity from GM's notoriously complex R&D processes by enshrining simplicity as a core tenet of GM's new product development approach.⁴³

Two factors have historically plagued GM's R&D processes. First, given its decentralized culture, different brands across multiple geographies were all running independent, often redundant R&D projects. This led to a proliferation of product platforms and higher costs. Second, GM's engineers had a predilection for creating every new car from scratch. This made the whole product development process lengthier and costlier. The result was a disorganized, underoptimized global R&D organization as complex as a jigsaw puzzle.

Barra is striving to streamline and simplify this chaotic structure by creating global platforms. These will allow every GM brand to be built off the same core architecture, whether it is produced in the United States, Europe, China, India, or Brazil. Such global platforms will allow engines and subsystems to also be shared across brands—gaining huge cost savings and faster time-to-market for all new GM models worldwide. Currently, only 30 percent of GM's products share global core architectures. By 2018, however, Barra wants 90 percent of GM's models to be built on global platforms.⁴⁴

Platform sharing is only one facet of Barra's great simplification strategy. The other facet is called lightweighting (aka mass reduction). The goal is to simplify the core architecture itself in order to make cars that are significantly lighter. Lightweighting happens when you make hundreds of small reductions of mass in the entire product architecture; for instance, by replacing heavy steel and aluminum with lighter carbon fiber. The net result will be far better fuel efficiency, an obsession with carmakers like GM since U.S. legislators passed a new law in July 2011 imposing stringent mileage requirements. U.S. automakers, including GM, are engaged in a race to improve their cars' current average 27.5 miles per gallon performance to 54.5 mpg by 2025—as required by the new law.

At the outset, Barra's efforts to simplify GM's development processes may appear to stifle the creative freedom of its R&D engineers. However, these constraints could provide the spur for developing a jugaad mindset at GM by fostering healthy “coopetition.” Indeed, one can imagine GM's R&D teams across the United States, Europe, and Asia collaborating to simplify the core product architecture—while simultaneously competing with each other as jugaad innovators to show which region can develop the hippest and most affordable, user-friendly, and sustainable cars, all using the same simplified core product architecture.⁴⁵

Make It Simple, Not Simplistic

Simplicity is often the most powerful antidote to complexity. But simple does not necessarily mean simplistic—realistically, complexity can be neither ignored nor avoided. Rather, innovators must embrace the complexity of a problem and then find a simple way through or around it. Consider the Google search engine. The technology behind it is the stuff of rocket science: the search software can solve, in less than a second, an equation of more than five hundred million variables to rank eight billion web pages by relevance. But the three hundred million users who do two billion searches every day on Google are totally oblivious to the complex algorithms executed behind the scenes every time they choose Search. Google's minimalist and intuitive home page cleverly hides the highly complex functionality of its search engine.⁴⁶

According to Marissa Mayer—currently Google's vice president of location and local services and previously in charge of the search site's look and feel, a role in which she acted as Google's “simplicity cop”: “Google has the functionality of a really complicated Swiss Army knife, but the home page is our way of approaching it closed. It's simple, it's elegant, you can slip it in your pocket, but it's got the great doodad when you need it.” Building on this metaphor, Mayer compares Google's competitors' products to “an open Swiss Army knife”—which can intimidate users and even potentially harm them. It's this obsessive attention to simplicity that helps explain why Google controls a nearly 60 percent (and growing) share of the search market.⁴⁷

In sum, Western companies can gain in simplicity by focusing on customer needs, rationalizing their product architectures, streamlining their R&D processes, and boosting collaboration between designers and engineers—just as Siemens, GM, and Google have done. Ultimately, to make simplicity part of their DNA, Western leaders must redesign their entire organizations around simplicity—a bold move undertaken by large corporations such as Philips and digital-age start-ups like Facebook.

How Facebook Is Leading the Low-Tech Revolution

Facebook, the social networking site, understands the importance of creating an interface of simplicity for the rich social media content it provides to its hugely diverse user base. By making simplicity the lynchpin of its product design strategy, Facebook has developed an easy-to-use social networking site that has rapidly conquered the hearts of more than eight hundred million users worldwide.

Nearly half the U.S. population has a Facebook account. Entertainment Weekly, in placing Facebook on its end-of-the-decade “best-of” list, wondered: “How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?”⁴⁸

Facebook's huge popularity and global appeal stem largely from its hyper-simplified user interface. Compared to some other flashy sites, Facebook may even feel anachronistic. The website has a clean look: easy-to-navigate content, few menu options, and no glitzy graphics. Creating new content on Facebook is a breeze; you don't need to be an expert web developer to do so. This may explain why, as of this writing, the average Facebook user creates over ninety pieces of content per month, adding up to more than thirty billion pieces of shared content across the network. In sum, Facebook's interface is so simple that even kids can use it, and so they do! According to ConsumerReports.org, there are 7.5 million children under thirteen with Facebook accounts.

Facebook's minimalist interface is not an act of randomness: it was intentionally designed using a frugal and inclusive principle called “social design.” Unlike traditional software design that produces abstract technology algorithms, social design develops new features based on how real people interact in the real world. The proponents of social design seek to improve the way people build human-to-human—rather than human-to-interface—connections on the Web. As Kate Aronowitz, Facebook's director of design, explains:

To deliver such authentic experiences to users, Facebook designers use everyday English words, rather than jargon or buzzwords, for features on the site. As Christopher Cox, vice president of product, explains: “In 2005, we decided to create a photo product that we called Photos. Other people at the time were using names like Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, right? Very niche-y. Instead, we use common words. We recede into the background. We design a place where there aren't new objects to trip over. Photos are photos. Chat is chat. Groups are groups. Everything just is.”⁵⁰

“Receding into the background” doesn't come easy to Silicon Valley start-ups, which generally like to impress users with their technological prowess. But on Facebook, the user is king. And this user can be logging in from New York, Cape Town, Mumbai, or Ulan Bator. In an effort to accommodate the mind-boggling diversity of its soon-to-be one-billion-user base, Facebook prefers to opt for the most universal basics when introducing new features—so that any user in any continent can intuitively understand and use them regardless of age, cultural background, and technical ability. Take, for example, the Like, Comment, and Share features that let you share your opinion of a photo, link, or status update. These inconspicuous and easy-to-use features have been a huge hit with users worldwide, irrespective of the language they speak. In many ways, the Facebook vocabulary is providing the building blocks for a long-elusive universal language that strives to unite humanity while simultaneously celebrating its diversity.

Reena Jana, a former editor at BusinessWeek who has extensively studied Facebook's design culture, notes that the “plainness” of Facebook's site may appear unsophisticated to the cognoscenti of the design world—museum curators and creative directors—who view the interface as “cold” and “unengaging.” But Jana believes these design experts are evaluating Facebook using traditional frames of reference, whereas Facebook is creating a whole new design paradigm—one that seeks to replicate offline human connections online by keeping them straightforward and genuine.⁵¹

By favoring simplicity over sophistication, Facebook is initiating a veritable revolution in the global technology sector—one that could be called the “low-tech revolution.”

Conclusion

Jugaad innovators accommodate the tremendous diversity of customer needs in emerging markets by integrating simplicity into their culture and their solution design—much as Philips, Siemens, Google, GM, and Facebook are doing in the West. This simplicity makes their solutions affordable and accessible not only to mainstream customers but also to those who live on the margins of society. Indeed, driven by empathy and a sense of social equity, jugaad innovators often use their creativity to devise inclusive business models that profitably meet the needs of the underserved consumer segments that are ignored by traditional enterprises. In the next chapter, we explore how by “including the margin” jugaad innovators can extend the reach of their offerings to a much larger audience in a socially equitable and economically viable fashion.