Official project title: Frugal Innovation Histories
Project leader: Herbert Wamalwa
Duration: 2019 - 2020
This research project is a broadly scoped field study to understand how new ‘frugal’ innovations are developed bottom-up, and how frugality drives the product development process and the market creation process. It also evaluates the role of frugality in legitimizing the innovation at household, community and societal level. Thus, the focus lies on collecting micro-level data of all relevant aspects of the innovation: its characteristics, the inventor/innovator, the context in which it is developed and used, innovation processes, different actors involved in the development, financing, commercialisation and use of the product, and the impacts at household and societal level.
The field study will be conducted in Kenya in the course of 2019/2020.
