ABSTRACT
Frugal Innovation has steadily gained prominence, emerging as a distinct innovation paradigm with recognisable traits and evolving from earlier notions such as Base-of-the-Pyramid innovation, frugal engineering, Gandhian engineering, and jugaad innovation. Among its key characteristics is its focus on designing solutions for users in resource-constrained environments. Despite its popularity and numerous reported case studies, a consistent framework defining its traits and characteristics is lacking, limiting the ability to design successful Frugal Innovations systematically. Following a PRISMA methodology, we conducted a literature review to identify a list of definitions, traits, and characteristics of Frugal Innovation. Similarly, this study identified 107 case studies of Frugal Innovations, published in a total of 17 research articles from indexed journals. We extracted and content-coded all explicit definitions and trait statements, then tracked the ten most-cited cases longitudinally to assess market success and sustainability outcomes. The findings reveal that cost efficiency, accessibility, performance, and functionality are crucial in the design of frugal innovations. Moreover, not all economical and resource-constrained solutions are successful frugal innovations. This study proposes a theoretical framework that integrates these factors to serve as a guide for systematically designing frugal innovations.
