Best Practices for Frugal and Sustainable Innovation

Abstract

While innovation is defined as the successful exploitation of new ideas incorporating new technologies, design, and best practice, the frugal innovation involves the use of local resources to come up with affordable, functional products that provide value for money. Frugal innovation is about creating efficient products to provide desirable user experience, at low cost by using resources frugally, while maintaining the safety and quality standards. Sustainable innovation could be defined as innovation that improves sustainability performance, where such performance includes ecological, economic, and social criteria. Sustainable innovation is a process where sustainability considerations are integrated into company systems from idea generation through to research, development, and commercialization. This applies not only to products and services, as well as to new business, technologies, and organizational models. Businesses nowadays cannot be competitive anymore just because of their industry or labor cost advantages. They can only remain competitive if they are highly focused on sustainability. On the other hand, in frugal innovation you must have the ability to do “more with less” by focusing on the creation of significant more business and social value while minimizing the use of resources. This study explores the best practices for frugal and sustainable innovation by investigating internal and external stakeholders in the top European countries in terms of sustainability and innovation. We discuss the implications of our findings aiming to build robust influential efforts for policy makers.