Pawan Kumar's 'Lucia' finds new fandom, team from IIM-B draws research from the making of the film

The cult of Pawan Kuma's 'Lucia' has refused to die down over the years. With each passing year, the film has found new fandom across the globe, and right from its nonlinear narrative to the music, every aspect has been scrutinized carefully and consumed by the public. Another highlight of 'Lucia' is its cost-effective production which had set a new benchmark not just for the Kannada Film Industry but the whole country itself and turns out this very "frugality" of the makers has gone on to impress those at the revered Indian Institute of Management (Bengaluru). Indeed, the making of 'Lucia' on a shoe-string budget has led Professor Rahul De and grad student N. Ravikumar from IIM-B to present a case on "frugal innovation", a business concept that illustrates creating value using very little resources. The duo has even published the full-length paper on the institute's website wherein it talks in length about the entrepreneurship behind the making and how the team developed "constraint-satisfying" solutions to their funding and other issues. 'Lucia' was Pawan Kumar's second directorial venture, and although the film's subject matter and making warranted a lot of attention, the resulting acclaim and fame across the country can still be deemed unprecedented. Through the 'Project Lucia' initiative, Pawan Kumar was able to attract as many as 110 investors to raise an amount of Rs. 0.50 crore for the production. Owing to the incredible word-of-mouth publicity and the content itself, the film went on to become a rage among the audiences who thronged the cinema halls to watch the film. The satellite rights of the film were sold for close to Rs. 1 crore and was later remade in Tamil as 'Enakkul Oruvan' with Siddharth Narayanan playing the lead.