Making Do with the Resources at Hand to Improve One’s Life and Others’ Lives

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter—“Making Do with the Resources at Hand to Improve One’s Life and Others’ Lives”—highlights the bright side of entrepreneurial action in response to chronic adversity. In this chapter, we discuss how most prior research has emphasized the importance of slack resources to explain creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. However, scholars have tended to under-emphasize the role of necessity in generating innovations and to over-emphasize the firm level of analysis when investigating value creation and capture. To add more balance to this discussion, in this chapter, we detail a study on problem solvers in an extremely resource-poor environment in rural India and the creative process they engage in to overcome their chronic adversity. This creative problem-solving process, known locally as jugaad, relies on individuals’ assertive defiance to engage in trial-and-error experiential learning so they can recombine at-hand resources for new purposes to devise frugal quick-fix solutions. By exploring this creative problem-solving process in a resource-poor environment, we provide new insights into the entrepreneurial responses of those confronting chronic adversity. Moreover, we describe why these entrepreneurial responses are unlikely to be sources of competitive advantage for firms but instead serve as sources of inclusive growth in the form of enhanced well-being for the respective entrepreneurs and their communities.