Navi Radjou is an independent scholar, an innovation and leadership advisor, an inspirational keynote speaker, and a bestselling author. Navi, who describes himself as a “humanistic coach with an ecological soul”, has advised hundreds of business leaders worldwide on both their inner development and corporate high-growth strategies.
Since 2021, Navi has been ranked by Thinkers50 as one of the 50 most influential management thinkers in the world.
Drawing on his Indian upbringing, he was the first (with his co-authors) to capture the phenomenon of jugaad—a Hindi word for improvised solutions born out of ingenuity in resource-constrained settings. Jugaad is our innate “MacGyver spirit”.
Building on his global bestseller Jugaad Innovation (over 200,000 copies sold worldwide), Navi has helped hundreds of companies and entrepreneurs unleash and harness the grassroots ingenuity of employees, customers, and partners to co-create simple but effective solutions that deliver greater socio-economic and ecological value at a lower cost.
Throughout the 30 years of his career—spanning the public sector to market research and then as an academic and author—Navi’s ideas have been shaped by his eclectic cultural background including his Indian roots, his French education, his cross-industry work experience in the US, Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
Navi’s new book, The Frugal Economy: Building a Better World with Less, published by Wiley and Thinkers50 in October 2024, chronicles the rise of a new multi-trillion-dollar economy fueled by 3 mega-trends—business-to-business (B2B) sharing, distributed manufacturing and hyper-local value chains, and regenerative business principles. Using +100 examples and proven best practices, this inspiring book shows business leaders how to reinvent their organization to thrive in the emerging frugal economy.
Navi is also co-author of From Smart To Wise: Acting and Leading With Wisdom, a book that shows how managers can hone their leadership skills to thrive in the age of smart AI. CEO coach Marshall Goldsmith calls the book “fascinating” and former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi views it as “a practical guide for accelerating your own wise leadership development.”
Navi’s other co-authored book Frugal Innovation: How To Do More With Less was published by The Economist with a foreword by Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever.
In 2013 Navi received the prestigious Thinkers50 Innovation Award—given to a management thinker who is reshaping the way we think about and practice innovation. His TED talk on frugal innovation has garnered over 2 million video views.
Previously, Navi served as Executive Director of the Centre for India & Global Business at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He was also a longtime VP/analyst at Forrester Research in Boston and San Francisco and advised senior executives worldwide on breakthrough growth strategies.
Over the past 30 years, Navi has consulted with many leading international firms—including E&Y, GM, Fujitsu, IBM, Microsoft, P&G, SAP, and TCS. He has served on World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Innovation & Entrepreneurship.
His work has been featured on NPR, BBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Financial Times, Fast Company, and the World Economic Forum’s Agenda. He has written for Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and strategy+business.
A widely sought-after inspirational keynote speaker, Navi has addressed audiences across the world in venues like the World Economic Forum, Council on Foreign Relations, Harvard, and MIT.
Born and raised in Pondicherry, India, Navi holds dual French-American citizenship.
He studied at Ecole Centrale Paris and Yale School of Management.
He is a lifelong student of Yoga, Ayurveda, Qigong, and Buddhist (Vipassana) meditation.