Lean

Bangalore’s Hosur Road is one of the best places to visit to understand where frugal innovation will come from. On a Monday morning it is a snaking, obstinate long traffic jam enveloped in dust as thousands of people mill around the near stationary cars visiting roadside restaurants, stalls, shacks and temples. Everything is for sale on the Hosur Road, from sheets of steel and earth-moving equipment to geneticists and heart operations. Next to shacks covered in blue plastic are buildings designed for US-style business parks. Places such as this — hot, crowded, dirty, turbulent, needy — will be the breeding grounds for innovations that change our world, just as much as the universities and R & D centres of the US and Europe. For Hosur Road brings together three critical ingredients for really radical innovation, of the kind that can remake industries and even ways of life: need, knowledge and ingenuity. There is no need for market research. The pressing scale of the need that young, poor people have for better solutions — places to live, forms of transport, healthcare — is right in front of you. Bangalore has attracted an eclectic bunch of people, with knowledge gleaned from all over the world, from industry as well as academia and science. When those people use the advantages of their marginal location — isolated from the great centres of healthcare research — to the full then they can rewrite conventional wisdom.