According to a press report, India’s Godrej Group has come up with yet another disruptive, frugal innovation. Godrej Consumer Products Limited (GPCL) has developed a mosquito repellent that works without electricity and costs just 1 Rupee (about 1.2 Euro cents). Ms. Nisaba Godrej, executive director of GCPL elaborated in  an interview with Ms. Nupur Anand of the Daily News & Analysis (DNA, Oct. 7, 2013):

Nisaba Godrej. Photo courtsey: dnaindia.com

“Close to 50% of India still doesn’t use a mosquito repellent. The main reasons, especially in rural India, are high prices and also lack of electricity. So, now we have come out with this product, which is at a very disruptive price point of Rs 1. It’s an affordable price point and the fact is you don’t require electricity for it. Therefore, we believe we can capture a fair share of the market, especially in rural India where close to 70% of the population doesn’t use any solutions to drive away mosquitoes.”

This statement signifies the key-criteria of frugal innovations as have been identified in our research, i.e. affordability, volume opportunities, reaching out to non-consumers, user-friendliness and circumventing the given infrastructral deficits. This statement also shows the importance of catering to consumers in rural areas, who do not by default need to be poor, but are still in many instances faced by infrastructral challenges. Ms. Godrej also emphasized the role of what she called was “cross pollination” of ideas and technologies globally, including in and from other emerging economies such as Indonesia and Argentina. This is again in line of our findings that frugal innovations benefit from “open global innovation networks“.

Read Ms. Godrej’s interview at DNA: “Godrej Consumer looking at consolidation, more things in Africa, Indonesia: Nisaba Godrej“. The Godrej Group, incidentally, is also known for its innovative battery-run refrigerator “ChotuKool“.

(Filed by Rajnish Tiwari, October 8, 2013)