What is it about?
This study explores frugal innovations in the context of Colombian researchers who engage with industry to transfer technology and create innovations with potential to upscale to society. Frugal innovations concern a smart and reduced use of local resources for its production and use, work around core functionalities, and show an optimised performance level that attends specific users' needs. We found three main benefits of these interactions between university and industry. First, they allow the exchange of specialised knowledge that helps to make incremental improvements on frugal innovations. Second, they support the implementation and strengthen the distribution and marketing strategies of innovations. Last, these interactions bring advantages to scale up production.
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Why is it important?
Understanding how researchers develop frugal innovations and what channels they use to partner with industry for their production and upscaling is an important way to input support services by university technology transfer offices, and to guide research and development policies that respond to societal needs. As our data covers different knowledge areas, from social work to engineering and pharmacy, we provide insights on possible preferred interaction channels per area of expertise, from consulting to joint R&D. By focussing on the work of researchers in creating innovation, we demonstrate the role universities in developing countries can play in inclusive development.
Perspectives
This paper is the result of serendipity in a research project on university-industry interactions in Colombia. It was with great enthousiasm that we discovered these innovations, among many others in the original study, which match the characteristics of frugal innovations. This led us to discuss, in the Latin American context, the meaning of frugal innovations and their commonalities and differences with the concept of social innovations, a well-known concept of innovation in this region. This discussion is also portrayed in the paper. Another conceptual and empirical contribution of this paper is demonstrating how the university-industry interaction framework is useful to explore upscalling processes of frugal innovations, as this is yet a missing link in the frugal innovation literature.
Assistant Professor Ariane Agnes Corradi
Federal University of Minas Gerais
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Emergence and Scale-up of Frugal Innovations: The Relevance of University-Industry Interaction, Journal of technology management & innovation, December 2021, SciELO Comision Nacional de Investigacion Cientifica Y Tecnologica (CONICYT),
DOI: 10.4067/s0718-27242021000300003.
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