Course on “Product Planning and Design for Frugal Innovations” at Santa Clara University

Prof. Herstatt teaching a SCU

Prof. Herstatt teaching a SCU

Taking the collaboration between Center for Frugal Innovation (CFI) and the Frugal Innovation Hub at Santa Clara University (SCU) to next level, we have developed a new course on “Product Planning and Design for Frugal Innovations” which is being offered currently to graduate students of the School of Engineering at SCU. The course has been developed by Prof. Dr. Cornelius Herstatt and Dr. Rajnish Tiwari and covers modern tools and methods for product design and development. It is based on a five phase stage-gate process model which integrates all major tasks that need to be paid attention to while creating new products and services. Continue reading

CFI enters a cooperation agreement with the Frugal Innovation Lab of Santa Clara University

A good news: Center for Frugal Innovation (CFI) of the Hamburg University of Technology (Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg; TUHH) has entered into a cooperation agreement with the Frugal Innovation Lab (FIL) of the Santa Clara University (SCU) in California, USA. The two parent institutions, i.e. SCU and TUHH recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for “Collaboration in the Area of Frugal Innovation”.

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Planned Obsolescence: Taking a Closer Look at Environmental Aspects of Frugal Innovation

By: Rajnish Tiwari

Planned obsolescence is causing not only immense harm to the environment, it might even be regarded as a risky, and to some extent an irresponsible, business strategy in a world where consumption is growing exponentially owing to the rise of the middle class in the emerging economies like China, India and much beyond; and where natural resources are depleting even faster. Average prices of some commdities (e.g. iron ore) have increased over 300% in past 12-13 years. Maybe frugal innovations are both a means and a wake-up call for us as consumers and producers to “return back” to a greater individual and collective relationality.

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Aiming Big with Small Cars: Emergence of a Lead Market in India

A new book by Rajnish Tiwari and Cornelius Herstatt dealing with frugal innovations and the role of emerging market countries, published by Springer

  • Critical analysis of today’s dominant logic and extension of lead market paradigm
  • Delivers new assessment tools for identifying emerging lead markets
  • Explores opportunities for frugal innovations and their constituent characteristics
  • Detailed analysis of a sunrise industry in India​

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“Cheap razor made after P&G watches Indians shave”

A report of the Associate Press appearing on the Internet site of India’s NDTV.com (October 6, 2013), says:

File pic: A man gets during the annual cattle fair in Pushkar, Rajasthan

File pic: A man gets during the annual cattle fair in Pushkar, Rajasthan. Photo: Associated Press. Coutsey: NDTV.com

New York: Procter & Gamble executives say it was striking the first time they witnessed a man shave while sitting barefoot on the floor in a tiny hut in India.

He had no electricity, no running water and no mirror.

The 20 US-based executives observed the man in 2008 during one of 300 visits they made to homes in rural India. The goal? To gain insights they could use to develop a new razor for India.

“That, for me, was a big ‘a-ha,'” said Alberto Carvalho, vice president, global Gillette, a unit of P&G. “I had never seen people shaving like that.”

The visits kicked off the 18 months it took to develop Gillette Guard, a low-cost razor designed for India and other emerging markets. Introduced three years ago, Guard quickly gained market share and today represents two out of every three razors sold in India. The story of how Guard came to be illustrates the balance companies must strike when creating products for emerging markets: It’s not as simple as slapping a foreign label on an American product. […]

This report also underlines the “lead market” function of India for frugal innovations that has been researched by our team and has been dealt with in greater detail in our forthcoming book “Aiming Big with Small Cars: Emergence of a Lead Market in India” (Springer). We are organizing a symposium on frugal innovations to cover upcoming key questions on global growth in both emerging as well as developed markets through affordable and good-enough solutions and to disseminate the results of our research. Meanwhile interested readers might like to read our article “Assessing India’s lead market potential for cost-effective innovations“, published in the Journal of Indian Business Research.