Global warming and the recent financial crises have prompted a rethink among businesses on the production of cost-effective products and services. Frugal-innovations, with their genesis mainly in India, are accordingly becoming popular in emerging and developed economies due to their lower costs and no frills structure. By studying a variety of frugal-innovations, this effort brings out the features of these innovations and also examines their disruptiveness vis-à-vis other innovations. Furthermore, this paper has formalized the frugal-innovation process based on examples covered in this effort. Such a formalization will aid in the metamorphosis of an ordinary innovation into the frugal type. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.

Balkrishna C. Rao

Department of Engineering Design

DEVELOPED ECONOMIES

Disruptive innovations

FINANCIAL CRISIS

FRUGAL-INNOVATION

PROCESS-BASED

Production of

Products and services

Education

Sustainable development

Technology

Global warming

COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS

economic development

FINANCIAL SYSTEM

Innovation

sustainability

India

IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Founded in 1959, it is recognised as an Institute of National Importance.

IIT Madras has been ranked as the top engineering institute in India for four years in a row by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the MHRD

It currently offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 16 disciplines in Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Management. About 596 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the Institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.

IIT Madras

Technology in Society

In recent years, frugal products of the grassroots and advanced types are being widely used due to their sustainable nature and also affordability. However, despite the origins of frugality at grassroots level, grassroots innovations continue to be fabricated in an ad hoc manner that precludes application of science and are thus susceptible to premature failure. This work advocates the use of scientific principles for developing frugal products in general with emphasis on classical and new design methodologies that are rooted in science to save resources, and hence lower costs, while aiming for robust product functionality. This paper sheds light on the importance of the safety factor in frugal designs and the need, from here onwards, of a factor of frugality for the systematic realization of both grassroots and advanced frugal products. In particular, adoption of the factor of frugality, that was developed recently, has been supported in this effort with a numerical example to display the effectiveness of applying science for designing from scratch frugal products that are both streamlined and robust in their functionality. © 2019 The Authors.

Fulltext

Royal Society Open Science

The science underlying frugal innovations should not be frugal

The conservative nature of design in engineering has typically unleashed products fabricated with generous amounts of raw materials. This is epitomized by the factor of safety whose values higher than unity suggests various uncertainties of design that are tackled through material padding. This effort proposes a new factor of safety called the factor of frugality that could be used in ecodesign and which addresses both rigors of the classical design process and quantification of savings in materials going into a product. An example of frugal shaft design together with some other cases has been presented to explain the working of the factor of frugality. Adoption of the frugality factor would entail a change in design philosophy whereby designers would constantly make avail of a rigorous design process coupled with material-saving schemes for realizing products that are benign to the environment. Such a change in the foundations of design would abet the stewardship of earth in avoiding planetary boundaries since engineering influences a significant proportion of human endeavors. © 2017 The Authors

Heliyon

Revisiting classical design in engineering from a perspective of frugality

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

Advanced frugal innovations

Sustainable development necessitates the management of progress in science and technology for society's betterment while preserving Earth's resources. In this regard, the appearance in recent years of low-cost sophisticated products consuming resources economically is a force for good. This effort terms each of these products as an advanced frugal innovation to highlight the frugality in resource consumption during the realization of these innovations through advances in various scientific disciplines. Other than 25 examples of advanced frugal innovations in a wide range of sectors from rural electrification to particle physics, a framework for the systematic realization of such innovations for sustainable development has also been described. The innovations showcased bring out the use of advances in science and technology or cutting edge knowledge for creating these low-cost sophisticated products. Moreover, the need for innovators typically with training in advanced knowledge areas to handle the sophistication in technology for the successful fruition of these innovations is also discussed. This effort supports the frugal design and frugal engineering of innovations, whether grassroots or the advanced type, through sound scientific principles for the creation of robust products, especially where the human life is at stake, in various sectors for all-round sustainable development. © 2017 IEEE.

IEEE Engineering Management Review

Advances in science and technology through frugality

Using Frugal Innovation to Serve Emerging Market Customers

Volume 45, Number 2, April 2018

Go East, young man, young woman, go East!

Special Events Galore

Informal Event? Go Cheap on Prizes

Population and Development Review

United Nations Statistics Division The World's Women 2015: Trends and Statistics New York: United Nations, 2015. 260 p.

Orthopaedic Knowledge Online Journal

http://orthoportal.aaos.org/oko/article.aspx?article=OKO_SHO060#article

How disruptive is frugal?

Journal	Technology in Society
ISSN	0160791X
Open Access	No