How Frugal Innovation Promotes Social Sustainability

Abstract

There is a need to develop an understanding of how frugal innovation promotes social sustainability. The objective of this paper is to find the connections between the two concepts of social sustainability and frugal innovation, by reviewing the existing literature concerning both fields. This paper presents a framework that identifies essential themes of social sustainability and explores them through frugal innovation. The framework builds on the important themes of social sustainability and shows their relevance in practice through frugal innovation. The notion of frugal innovation can be viewed as an approach towards realizing social sustainability and fulfilling the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

Introducing a Sustainability Evaluation Framework based on the Sustainable Development Goals applied to Four Cases of South African Frugal Innovation

“…For the evaluated frugal innovations, the greatest impact is on the social dimension. This goes in line with the results of Khan () and Rosca et al () who emphasized the importance of frugal innovations for social sustainability. Ecological aspects are important as well, especially for 5 Star Stoves and SavvyLoo.…”

“…Furthermore, he emphasized that product development has to consider infrastructural issues (Prahalad, ). These requirements resemble the key characteristics that frugal innovations display in their development and features, which is one reason why they are associated with the BOP (Khan, ; Pansera & Sarkar, ; Wohlfahrt et al, ). Illustrating the development of the definition of frugal innovation in the meantime, Pisoni et al () created a timeline showing the development of frugal innovation concepts.…”

“…Besides conceptual articles, the interrelation of frugal innovation and sustainability has meanwhile also been examined in case studies. For instance, Khan () investigated several cases and emphasized the role of frugal innovation to support social sustainability. Contrarily to research strengthening the connection between frugal innovation and sustainability, Rosca, Arnold, and Bendul () underlined that sustainability is no binding feature of frugal innovations.…”

“…Achieving sustainability means rethinking economic growth completely. That is where the concept of frugal innovations comes to mind as it is commonly associated with emerging and developing countries as well as sustainability (Brem & Ivens, 2013;Khan, 2016;Levänen et al, 2016). According to Wohlfahrt, Bünger, Lang-Koetz, and Wagner (2016), these innovations focus on core functionalities of products and services and are affordable for price-sensitive customer groups.…”

The ICT adoption in enterprises in the context of the sustainable information society

“…trust, common meaning, diversity as well as capacity for learning and capacity for self-organization [26]. It is seen as dependent on social networks, making community contributions, creating a sense of place and offering community stability and security [27], [28]; and  Political sustainability (Pol) must rest on the basic values of democracy and effective appropriation of all rights. It is related to the engagement of enterprises in creating democratic society [28].…”