Track 10 - Frugal Innovation: Impacting Business, Society and the Environment 

Track leaders:  

• Arman Sadreddin, Concordia University, Canada 

• Suchit Ahuja, Concordia University, Canada 

• Stephanie Cadeddu, Cégep du Vieux-Montréal, Canada  

Frugal innovation has gained widespread global acceptance in research, industry, and society. Frugal products and services are focused on affordability and repurposing while being developed in resource-constrained contexts, yet creating simultaneous business, social, and/or environmental impact. Frugal innovation provides an opportunity for rapidly and affordably scaling the impact of the UN SDGs, for example, by providing digitally enabled and simplified access to healthcare, sanitation, education, and ensuring food security. Recent research highlights the use of digital tools, technologies, platforms, value chains, and business models to enable the development of open, accessible, and affordable, “frugal” solutions. Nonetheless, frugal innovation has been criticized as another consumption-driven paradigm of innovation and there have been calls for making it a more responsible and sobriety-driven approach. This track invites scholars to propose contributions from various sources and welcome papers with both conceptual and empirical focus. We aim to elevate and evolve academic and practitioner discourses on frugal innovation and its contribution to business, social, and ecological transformations. We encourage contributions that focus on how the philosophy and practice of frugal innovation are leveraged for reimagining business models, entrepreneurship, sustainability, societal impact, and digital transformation.