Technological products are tailored in order to fit the lower price and high volumes targeted to emerging markets. This innovation has been very useful in the BOP market since in this market the resources are very limited and in some cases are not even possible to obtain. For instance, there are some rural areas in which electricity is not present and thus, for example, many people have other ways to conserve food. The approach taken by the frugal innovation is bottom-up, that is the opposite of the more traditional western style of R&D, in which the main collaborators can be the BoP consumers themselves since they can understand the real need in the market. According to Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu, in order to incorporate the frugal innovation idea in a firm you should follow these five key …show more content…
“Use KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to incentivize and sustain frugal behavior across the organization”
5. “Evangelize the “do better with less” mantra”. The CEOs should put their personal reputation in favor of the frugal innovation in their company in order to influence and make it a mantra among employees, partners and investors.
Frugal innovation is very much linked with disruptive innovation for social change, which is also the name of a paper written by Christensen, Baumann, Ruggles and Sadtler. Christensen is the professor who first wrote about the concept of Disruptive Innovation, which in his major paper called “Disruptive innovation” he defines it as “a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors”. In the former paper, the authors recognize the main issue in the United States regarding the not satisfactory returns in the social sector, such as in education, which are the misdirected investments by the government in organizations that prefer to maintain the status quo rather than changing their models. The solution they suggest must be new, scalable, sustainable and system-changing and they call it “catalytic innovation”. The latter is a subset of disruptive innovation which “can surpass the status quo by providing good enough solutions to inadequately addressed social problems” (Christensen et al. 2006). The catalytic