which one is not connected to decision taken by Suzuki to make sourcing hub: Options: A. Product engineering skill of Indian manufacturers B. India is located near to Japan C. Frugal engineering concepts of Indians D. Quality consciousness as perceived by Suzuki
Answers
h a vision of mass manufacturing ‘the People’s Car’, Tata Motors set out to design the least expensive production car in the world for under Rupees 100,000 (around $ 2,000).
When it was launched in late 2009, it made headlines around the globe; the Nano was heralded a new breed of transportation.
Since then, sales of the Tata Nano have been disappointing, leading many observers to brand it as a failure.
Is the Tata Nano a success or a failure?
Did they get the price point wrong?
Will it ever really sell outside India?
Questions such as these seem — to us — to miss the real story behind innovations like the Nano, GE’s portable ECG machine developed in India, or the ChotuKool (a cheap replacement for a refrigerator targeted to rural Indian consumers).
However interesting each of these innovations might be, (or even how much money these particular products may lose or make), it is of much more fundamental interest to recognize the revolution in product-design philosophy that they embody.
Carlos Ghoshn, who heads Renault-Nissan, is credited with coining the term frugal engineering, to signify achieving more with fewer resources. Others have described similar ideas under terms such as reverse innovation, Gandhian innovation or even “Indo-vation.”
Whatever the term, the real story behind the Nano is a radically new product-design philosophy and a new approach to innovation. (See article on Reverse Innovation elsewhere in this issue).
Global leadership in an industry is often linked to having demanding domestic market consumers. It is so partially because Japanese consumers are extremely demanding when it comes to electronics, German consumers for automobiles, Americans for fast food products, and French and Italian consumers for fashion, so much so, in fact, that one observes leading companies in these industries from the vantage point of their respective countries and the needs of their respective markets.
A similar dynamic is alive and well in India. Innovation is a direct response to meeting the needs of Indian marketplace, where consumers are both demanding as well as budget constrained.
According to Guillermo Wille, former Managing Director at GE India, “the beauty of the Indian market is that it pushes you in a corner…it demands everything in the world, but cheaper and smaller.”
In our research, we found that India was building a capability for frugal engineering.
Given that this appears to be a practice that is taking root in China and other emerging markets, we conducted extensive research on frugal engineering.
We discovered many examples that in turn led us to identify six underlying principles or pillars on which such frugal engineering efforts often seem to rest. We describe these principles in this article.