Frugal Innovations: The Evolving Research Agenda and Community Efforts

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Recently, Prof. Cornelius Herstatt and Rajnish Tiwari, representing the Center for Frugal Innovaions at TIM/TUHH, attended a symposium on frugal innovations and presented  a conceptual work on frugal innovations titled “The Frugal Paradigm: Developing a Conceptual Framework for Affordability-Driven Innovations“.

Logo for the 73rd Annual Meeting of AOM (2013)The talk was delivered at the symposium “Frugal Innovation: Ways forward for Concept, Theory and Practice” organized during the recently held 73rd Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (AOM) from August 9-13, 2013 – Lake Buena Vista (Orlando). The symposium was chaired by Radha Basu, Director of the Frugal Innovation Lab at Santa Clara University, and organized by Preeta Banerjee (Brandeis University), Yasser Ahmad Bhatti (University of Oxford), Sanjay Jain (Santa Clara University), and Shaista E. Khilji (George Washington University). Marc Ventresca (University of Oxford) acted as Discussant of the papers presented at the symposium, which consisted of:

  • Conceptualizing and Operationalizing Frugal Innovation
    By: Yasser Ahmad Bhatti (University of Oxford)
  • Frugal innovation and Disruptive Innovation Theory
    By: Sanjay Jain (Santa Clara University)
  • The Frugal Paradigm: Developing a Conceptual Framework for Affordability-Driven Innovations
    By: Rajnish Tiwari and Cornelius Herstatt (Hamburg University of Technology)
  • The Practice of Frugal Innovation in Healthcare and IT
    By: Preeta Banerjee and William J Oliver (Brandeis University)
  • Frugal Solutions: Lessons from Practice
    By: Peter Hesseldahl (Universe Foundation)

The symposium was well attended and followed by a meeting of the core team of organizers / presenters / discussant and some interested participants from the researcher community that included Aditi Ramdorai (Hamburg Univesity of Technology), Jody Johannessen (Zayed University, Dubai), and Ronny Reinhardt (Dresden University of Technology). The participants agreed to foster the research on frugal innovations through intensified collaboration. Need was felt was creating an exchange platform such as a blog, that would enable the frugal innovation community to share and disseminate ideas and information about research and upcoming events. One of the next events is a symposium on frugal innovations set to be held on the 18th and 19th of November in Hamburg, Germany. This symposium will have two tracks (an academic one on the 18th, and a practitioner one on the 19th) is being organized by CIF. More details to follow on this. For any queries, please feel free to contact Rajnish Tiwari.