Can Silicon Valley learn to “innovate under constraint” — like DeepSeek did ?

In 2012, right after our book Jugaad Innovation was published in the US, I gave a talk at the legendary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in Silicon Valley titled “Innovation: Under Constraint”

Founded in 1970 by Xerox and set up as an independent company in 2002, PARC pioneered many disruptive tech innovations such as Ethernet, laser printing, and the Alto personal computer.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs owe much of their success to PARC.

In 2023, PARC joined SRI International, a global leader in R&D set up by Stanford University in 1946.

Sonal Chokshi, who headed content & community, invited me to give this talk at PARC in 2012.

It was Sonal who suggested I title my talk “Innovation: Under Constraint” (while I wanted a title that explicitly mentioned “frugality” and “ingenuity”)

Sonal felt the agile jugaad mindset and the frugal innovation paradigm expounded in our book was alien to Silicon Valley, inured to abundance and complacency.

She felt my public lecture on resource constraints as the basis of creativity will challenge the orthodox thinking and profiligate innovation ethos of the Silicon Valley ecosystem.

Today, DeepSeek — which developed a low-cost AI model under contraint — shows Silicon Valley that if necessity is the mother of innovation, scarcity is the grand-mother of (frugal) innovation !

Let’s hope Silicon Valley will heed this “frugal” message !

PS: In 2015, I returned to PARC to lead a discussion on my new book Frugal Innovation, coauthored with Jaideep Prabhu. Watch replay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCgHSAT3Ejs .