Frugal Innovation: Meta-Analysis of Bibliographic Relationships and Identification of Research Trends for the Period 2010–2021

Abstract

Global social, economic, and environmental challenges have stimulated the emergence of local innovation initiatives. The current study aims to systematize the knowledge about frugal innovation based on bibliographic analysis. Through quantitative content analysis, we collected information about the following features of research on frugal innovations. The scientific contribution of this study is the proposed frugal innovations penetration index for the subject areas of publications. It has provided a meta-analysis of the level of frugal innovations penetration into the subject areas of scientific research. The results show that over the past decade, research on frugal innovations was largely concentrated on IT/ICT, healthcare, product design, and manufacture industries, while agriculture, livestock, service, education, and other sectors, requiring frugal and sustainable approaches, received less attention. The findings also suggest that the aetiology of frugal innovation in developing and emerging markets has sparked the interest of developed countries. In this study, frugal innovation is seen as a tool that companies can employ to expand their geographic footprint and move into new industries. A meta-analysis of bibliographic relationships of publications in the context of subject areas based on correlation analysis and regression modeling identified the most influential areas for the development of FI research, among them Engineering and Decision Sciences. The advantage of the proposed approach is that it provides an opportunity to diagnose the asymmetry of the research carried out, which has a significant impact on the level of equal penetration in the subject areas.