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Emerging markets are at the core of developing frugal innovations that create value in society. This research paper's overall purpose is to showcase how the emerging market of Zimbabwe has created frugal products through the company Econet Wireless Limited; that have brought a significant turnaround in the economy and, in doing so, have positively impacted the society. Additionally, the research problems of the company’s precise frugal innovations, how they create social value, and to what extent were investigated. The case study method was utilized, and data was collected using existing and or secondary data. Of the frugal innovations by Econet Wireless Limited, Ecocash, a mobile money service, provided a financial system for the unbanked and exbanked solving the money or coin shortage problem. Econet Solar, Econet’s brand for solar products, presented an alternative source to the country's lack of electricity. However, beneficial both products were discovered to have shortcomings that can be improved upon or corrected.
The rapid pace of change is posing a series of challenges both in industrialized and in emerging economies. Throughout history, one important measure to deal with change was to further develop technology, to find the right solution, to improve the current standard, in one word: to innovate. Over the past decades, different types of innovation have emerged. One fairly recent form is frugal innovation. The principle of frugal innovation is to build a strategic fit between affordability, quality and sustainability with the aim to create a greater value for customers while using fewer resources as capital, time or material. In view of contemporary developments like globalization, climate change, or increasing poverty which create issues across countries, industries and social classes, frugal innovation can offer solutions. Existing literature mainly reports about frugal innovation as an option to serve consumers from low income markets in developing countries. However, the concept might be already or might become in future equally crucial for industrialized economies. The purpose of this research is to investigate the future development of frugal innovation in industrialized economies. A critical question in this paper is to identify how much innovation concepts in industrialized economies differ from innovation concepts in emerging countries and in the following, to assess to what extend the frugal innovation concept would imply a reorientation for industrialized economies. The results indicate that innovators in industrialized economies still follow the typical “higher, faster, further strategy” and that different mind-sets might be necessary to introduce a frugal innovation approach. Moreover, the results show that frugal innovation offers a unique combination of principles that respond to a very high degree to present consumer, market or eco-political trends. A limitation of this paper is that in industrialized countries, hitherto there exist very few examples of frugal innovation concepts. Subsequently, the theoretical and empirical literature, which can be reviewed, is limited.