From Jugaad to Scale: What Professionalization Really Means for Indian Dhandas
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Jugaad has helped Indian businesses survive, adapt, and innovate under constraint. That deserves respect.
But the same mindset becomes a liability when temporary fixes harden into a permanent operating model. What works in scarcity does not always work at scale.
That is the turning point many Indian dhandas are now facing. Markets are more digital, competition is more data-driven, customers are more informed, and the margin for error is shrinking. Many MSMEs have adopted basic digital tools, but advanced digital maturity is still limited, even as the sector remains central to India’s GDP and employment.
Professionalisation, then, does not mean becoming slow, corporate, or soulless. It means turning entrepreneurial hustle into a resilient business system.
Key takeaways
Jugaad has two sides: frugal innovation under constraint, and quick-fix patchwork that avoids root-cause repair. Recent research explicitly describes this as a paradox. (ScienceDirect)
Indian MSMEs and family businesses still face major governance, digital, and scaling gaps. PwC’s India family business survey found only 63% reported formal governance structures, and only 36% expressed confidence in their digital capabilities. (PwC)
The world of business is becoming more digital, platform-driven, and complex. Many MSMEs use basic tools, but advanced technologies remain far less adopted.
Professionalisation is not bureaucracy. It is clarity: roles, processes, dashboards, decision rules, training systems, and governance.
Businesses that do not move from workaround culture to systems culture risk accumulating operational, process, documentation, cultural, and architectural debt.
Indian dhandas do not need to lose their speed. They need to build systems that preserve speed without preserving chaos.
Jugaad deserves respect — but only in the right place
Jugaad is often discussed as if it means one thing. It does not.
In one sense, jugaad means frugal innovation: finding a workable, creative, resource-light solution under difficult conditions. Research on frugal innovation in India recognizes this positive side and treats jugaad as an ingenious response to institutional and resource constraints. (Springer)
In another sense, jugaad means a temporary patch masquerading as a long-term solution: a bandage on a bullet wound. That side is much darker. A 2025 study in the Journal of Open Innovation argues that jugaad has both positive and negative attributes and warns against romanticizing it without acknowledging the risks of unsafe, weak, or ethically compromised quick-fix behavior. (ScienceDirect)
Both meanings are real. The problem begins when businesses confuse the first for the second.
Why jugaad worked for so long
A great many Indian businesses did not grow in conditions of abundance. They grew in scarcity, unpredictability, uneven infrastructure, fragmented markets, and resource constraints. In that context, improvisation was not a flaw. It was often the only available method.
That is why traditional dhandas deserve respect. They built trust, supply chains, customer relationships, and livelihoods in environments where formal systems were weak or inaccessible. Even today, MSMEs remain central to India’s economy, contributing nearly 30% to GDP and employing more than 230 million people. (World Economic Forum)
So the argument is not that traditional businesses were “wrong.” The argument is that the conditions around them have changed faster than many of their internal operating models have.
The old formula breaks when scale meets complexity
Business should be simple in principle: find demand, deliver value, get paid.
But the operating environment is no longer simple.
Digital platforms, customer discovery, websites, search, social media, branding, data, e-commerce, payments, and AI have all changed how firms compete. The RIS report on MSME digitalisation in India describes a “digital revolution” reshaping industries and says that while basic tool adoption has improved, significant gaps remain in advanced technologies, with awareness, skill shortages, and financial constraints still holding firms back.
That is especially important in India because a large number of businesses are still traditional, founder-led, family-run, or micro in structure. PwC’s India family business survey shows the tension clearly: these firms are optimistic and resilient, but many still lag on governance, digital confidence, agility, and formalized management structures. (PwC)
So the challenge is not that Indian dhandas lack entrepreneurial instinct. The challenge is that instinct alone is no longer enough.
What professionalisation does not mean
Professionalisation is often misunderstood.
It does not mean:
becoming slow
copying large corporations blindly
replacing entrepreneurial judgment with endless meetings
killing family ownership or founder energy
overcomplicating a small business with jargon and paperwork
In fact, badly done professionalisation can do all of that.
But real professionalisation is something else. It is the design of a business that can grow without depending on improvisation for everything.
It is what allows a dhanda to remain fast without remaining fragile.
What professionalisation really means
Professionalisation means moving from personality-driven execution to system-driven execution.
In practical terms, it means the business becomes clearer about:
what work exists
which roles own which work
how work is performed
what tools and templates support it
what decisions can be made at what level
what must be measured
who reviews performance
how people are trained
how knowledge is retained when people leave
This is why professionalisation is not an HR exercise or a documentation exercise alone. It is an operating model exercise.
For practical routes into this, OrgEvo’s related guides on capability architecture, organizational design, process architecture mapping, and operational systems make the same point from different angles: businesses scale more reliably when structure, capability, process, and ownership are designed together. (OrgEvo)
The hidden price of staying in workaround mode
The trouble with the wrong kind of jugaad is that it creates debt.
Not financial debt alone, but operating debt.
A business that keeps postponing structural fixes often accumulates:
Operational debt
Work keeps getting done, but through workarounds, founder intervention, and manual fixes.
Process debt
The real way work happens is different from the official way, and no one updates the process properly.
Documentation debt
Critical know-how lives in people’s heads instead of in usable SOPs, templates, and playbooks.
Cultural debt
The team becomes used to urgency, firefighting, and blame-shifting instead of discipline and improvement.
Architectural debt
The business adds tools, roles, approvals, and exceptions without a coherent underlying design.
These debts are manageable for a while. Then they become scaling friction.
That is why many promising businesses suddenly feel “too complex to fix” later. The complexity did not appear overnight. It accumulated through deferred professionalisation.
Why this matters especially for Indian family businesses and MSMEs
This topic is not abstract in India.
ICRIER’s 2025 annual MSME survey describes the sector as fragmented and largely informal and links underperformance to low productivity, limited access to finance, information, and skilled human resources. The report’s basic implication is clear: enterprise development depends not only on markets and funding, but on better systems, capability, and digital maturity. (ICRIER)
PwC’s India family business survey shows a similar pattern from a different angle. Indian family businesses are growth-oriented, but many still need stronger governance, digital enablement, succession planning, and risk preparedness. Formal governance is far from universal, digital confidence remains modest, and agility under changing conditions is weaker than it should be. (PwC)
So when people say “Indian businesses need to professionalise,” the point is not to imitate someone else’s culture. The point is to build enough structure to survive the next stage of competition.
The world is changing faster than informal businesses can comfortably absorb
One of the biggest reasons this issue has become urgent is that the external environment is changing at the same time that businesses themselves are becoming more complex.
The RIS digitalisation report says MSMEs face both opportunity and vulnerability in the current wave of digital transformation. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 AI playbook for India’s MSMEs goes further, arguing that AI could unlock over $500 billion in economic value for the sector if adoption becomes practical and widespread.
That means two things at once:
More opportunity is available than before.
More capability is required than before.
A business that is still running mostly on memory, undocumented approvals, informal roles, and founder rescue may survive for a while. But it will struggle to compete against businesses that are digitally visible, process-driven, and operationally measurable.
That is why this is not just a modernization issue. It is a survivability issue.
Professionalisation without losing entrepreneurial speed
The fear many founders and family businesses have is understandable: if systems become too formal, the company will lose its speed.
That risk is real — if systems are designed badly.
But good systems do not slow a business down. They remove the wrong kind of slowness:
repeated clarification
founder bottlenecks
duplicated work
missed handoffs
rework
confused accountability
slow onboarding
and delayed decisions
The goal is not to replace entrepreneurial speed with corporate drag. It is to replace chaotic speed with disciplined speed.
In other words:
keep the frugality
keep the market instinct
keep the decision velocity
but reduce the guesswork, opacity, and dependency on heroic intervention
That is what real professionalisation looks like in an Indian context.
A practical way to move from jugaad to scale
A useful transition path looks like this:
1. Respect what already works
Do not start by insulting the existing business. Identify where entrepreneurial instinct, local trust, and frugal execution are genuine strengths.
2. Separate clever improvisation from recurring dysfunction
Ask which workarounds are temporary innovations and which are now permanent weak spots.
3. Map the business as a system
Identify the real capabilities of the business: sales, delivery, support, finance, people, governance, improvement, and planning.
4. Clarify role ownership
Define what each role is actually responsible for, accountable for, consulted on, and informed about.
5. Document repeatable work
Turn repeated work into usable SOPs, checklists, templates, decision rules, and training material.
6. Add trackers and dashboards
Measure what matters. If a capability matters, it should be visible. If it is visible, it becomes governable.
7. Build training and succession
Make sure the business can teach how work is done and survive when key people leave.
8. Digitize only after systemizing
Technology works better when it is layered onto clear business logic, not onto confusion.
This is also where OrgEvo’s internal work on enterprise architecture for small businesses, business process mapping, and operational system design is relevant: structure should follow business reality, not buzzwords. (OrgEvo)
Why AI raises the stakes even more
AI is not only another technology wave. It is an amplifier.
Businesses with better systems will use AI to move faster. Businesses with weaker systems may use AI only superficially, or get overwhelmed by tools they cannot really integrate.
The World Economic Forum’s MSME AI playbook is useful here because it treats AI adoption not as a gimmick, but as a serious competitiveness lever for Indian MSMEs. That strengthens the core point: professionalisation is no longer just about governance or neatness. It is now part of digital readiness itself. (World Economic Forum)
A business cannot meaningfully automate what it has never clearly defined. It cannot delegate to AI what it cannot explain to people. And it cannot build resilience with technology if the underlying operating model is still held together by informal fixes.
So the next stage of Indian competitiveness will not be won by jugaad alone. It will be won by businesses that can combine frugal innovation with system design.
What this means for Indian dhandas
Indian dhandas do not need to abandon their entrepreneurial DNA.
They need to evolve it.
The future belongs neither to rigid bureaucracy nor to endless improvisation. It belongs to businesses that can stay nimble while becoming measurable, governable, and trainable.
That is the real shift:
from instinct alone to instinct plus systems
from quick fixes to structured improvement
from founder memory to shared knowledge
from hustle to operational leverage
from survival logic to scale logic
In that sense, professionalisation is not the opposite of entrepreneurship.
It is entrepreneurship that has grown up enough to scale.
Conclusion
Jugaad helped Indian businesses survive scarcity. That history should be respected, not mocked.
But the next chapter requires something more.
The positive side of jugaad — frugality, ingenuity, speed, adaptability — is still valuable. The negative side — patchwork fixes, deferred structure, and permanent workaround culture — has become a drag on scale. Research on jugaad now explicitly recognizes this paradox, and current evidence from Indian MSMEs and family businesses shows that governance, digital maturity, and operating discipline matter more than ever. (ScienceDirect)
Professionalisation, then, is not about becoming less Indian, less entrepreneurial, or less practical.
It is about building businesses that can remain fast without remaining fragile.
If Indian dhandas want to scale into the next decade, they do not need less entrepreneurial instinct. They need more system behind it.
If support is needed to move from workaround-driven growth to system-led scale, contact OrgEvo Consulting.
FAQ
1. What does “professionalisation” mean for Indian dhandas?
It means building enough structure — roles, SOPs, dashboards, decision rules, training, and governance — so that the business can grow without depending on constant improvisation.
2. Is jugaad always bad?
No. Research treats jugaad as both a positive form of frugal innovation and a potentially risky form of patchwork problem-solving. The issue is not ingenuity itself, but mistaking temporary fixes for long-term design. (ScienceDirect)
3. Why is this especially important now?
Because Indian businesses are operating in a more digital, data-driven, and competitive environment, while many MSMEs still lag on advanced digital adoption and process maturity.
4. Does professionalisation mean becoming slow and corporate?
No. Done well, professionalisation reduces the wrong kind of slowness — rework, unclear ownership, bottlenecks, and confusion — while preserving decision speed.
5. Why are family businesses so central to this conversation?
Because many Indian businesses are still family-run or founder-led, and current survey data shows they remain strong on growth ambition but weaker than they should be on governance, succession, and digital readiness. (PwC)
6. What is the biggest risk of staying informal too long?
The business accumulates operational, process, documentation, cultural, and architectural debt, which eventually makes growth much harder and costlier.
7. Can a small business professionalise without overcomplicating itself?
Yes. The point is not to build bureaucracy. The point is to create enough clarity and repeatability for the business to scale.
8. Where should a business start?
Usually with capability mapping, role clarity, process documentation, and basic dashboards. Those create the base for better governance and smarter digitization. (OrgEvo)
9. How does AI relate to this?
AI will help the businesses with the clearest systems most. Businesses that have not defined their work clearly will struggle to use AI beyond superficial tasks. (World Economic Forum)
10. What is the real goal here?
Not to become “corporate.” The real goal is to become resilient, scalable, and future-ready without losing entrepreneurial edge.
References
World Economic Forum, Transforming Small Businesses: An AI Playbook for India’s MSMEs. (World Economic Forum)
Ministry of MSME, Annual Report 2024–25.
RIS, MSME Digitalisation in India: Current Status and Challenges.
ICRIER, Annual Survey of MSMEs in India 2025: The Role of Digitalisation in Enterprise Development. (ICRIER)
PwC, India Family Business Survey 2023 and 12th Family Business Survey India findings. (PwC)
Ananthram & Chan, The paradox of responsible Jugaad innovation. (ScienceDirect)
Ananthram & Chan, Institutions and frugal innovation: The case of Jugaad. (Springer)
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