Towards an adaptive framework of low-end innovation capability – A systematic review and multiple case study analysis

Abstract

Low-end innovations, defined as new products or services that expand a market by addressing consumers with a low willingness or ability to pay, have a dual purpose – they can be a prerequisite for firm survival and growth and a major driver of societal change. To overcome the scattered nature of existing low-end innovation research and its lack of an explicit capability conceptualization, which limits academia's ability to move extant knowledge about the domain forward and limits firms' abilities to reliably produce successful low-end innovations, we present the results of a systematic review of the literature (99 journal articles) and a multiple case study analysis (7 cases). The resulting framework helps understand what constitutes a low-end innovation capability. The findings show that firms need a specific and interdependent capability set consisting of internal dimensions (low-end culture and commitment, integrated cost-reducing innovation, high volume scaling), interface dimensions (distant customer needs acquisition, iteration, total solution development) and external dimensions (access creation, low-end support networking) to cope with low-end markets' unique characteristics. The study also identifies market- and firm-specific contingencies for each capability dimension and analyzes the relationship between low-end and “regular” innovation capability.