Frugal Innovation Hijacked: The Co-optive Power of Co-creation

‘Innovation’ continues to be a catch-word with positive associations, a signifier that is deployed in business and policy to imply good impacts on the economy and society (Godin, 2016; Gripenberg et al., 2012; Perren & Sapsed, 2013). Having become a defining feature of (Western) hegemonic modernity during the twentieth century (see Godin, 2016), the term today stands for that which provides the solutions for market needs and wants, as well as for a variety of societal ills and problems—thus, its absolute positivity is taken for granted (see e.g., Gripenberg et al., 2012; Liu & Pechenkina, 2019). While it was not a particularly dominant concept in the Brundtland report (WCED, 1987), ‘innovation’ has now become highly prevalent within contemporary sustainable development discourse—apparently 20 times as prevalent, from being mentioned only 13 times in the Brundtland report’s approximately 400 pages, to 26 times in the 40-page Agenda 2030 document (UN Sustainable Development, 2015). The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have explicitly made innovations the key for tackling sustainability challenges of numerous sorts: “without innovation there is no way to overcome the challenges of our time” (UN Secretary-General, 2017).

Various types of innovation concepts have recently proliferated in the arena of sustainable development: inclusive, reverse, grassroots, green, social innovations—just to name a few—have created diverse sets of meanings under the umbrella of sustainable innovation. This paper looks into the recent emergence of a new member in the family of sustainable innovations: frugal innovation. In its literal sense, the word frugal means “simple”, “plain”, or “using money or supplies in a very careful way” (Merriam Webster, 2019). Frugal innovations are typically framed as innovations driven by scarce resources and regional circumstances of poverty and exigency (Pansera & Martinez, 2017). Commonly credited for enhancing efficiency of resource utilization (Zeschky et al., 2014), frugal innovations generally refer to products, technologies and services developed in and for resource-constrained environments. A typical example would be the Mitticool, a clay refrigerator that does not require electricity and costs less than 50 USD (Wierenga, 2015). Mitticool was developed by a clay craftsman in a Gujarati village and it continues to be an economic success story of frugal innovations.

The idea of frugal innovation is not new: developing “good-enough”, simple products for ‘the poor’ can be traced back to the appropriate technology movement in the 1970s, initiated by Ernst Schumacher (Kaplinsky, 2011; Schumacher, 1973). Frugal innovations have gained heightened attention in their countries of origin (The Economist, 2014), and their growing global reputation has attracted powerful actors from the global North to get involved in the business as well (Hossain, 2016; Pansera & Owen, 2017). Transnational corporations such as Philips, Bosch, General Motors and 3 M have allegedly adopted frugal innovation practices in their subsidiaries and established collaborative research centers in India, Kenya, China and South Africa.

Why are innovations—and more specifically frugal innovations—increasingly incorporated in sustainable development discourse? Whose interests are being served while promoting frugal innovations as win–win solutions to sustainable development challenges? Despite the increasing popularity of frugal innovations, the academic literature on them remains scant and calls for more empirical and theoretical studies to answer such questions (Bhatti, 2012; Hossain, 2018; Knorringa et al., 2016; Tiwari et al., 2016). In this paper we investigate how different discourses on frugal innovation relate to the ‘sustainable innovation’ field of discursivity, and how the dynamics between these different discourses have led to a certain dominant understanding and implications of frugal innovation today. Through a genealogical problematizing review (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2020; Quistgaard Steensen & Villadsen, 2020), we find that discourses on frugal innovation can be traced back to discourses on (1) innovations for the poor, and (2) grassroots innovations by the poor. In illustrating the community-driven discourse on grassroots innovations by the poor, we particularly draw on the context of India. We also find that more recently, a third discourse drawing connections with these two discourses has advanced a more governance-driven perspective on co-creating frugal innovations with the poor. We argue that this latter discourse is articulated as a ‘hegemonic project’ (Torfing, 1999) as it is designed to accommodate demands from both business and poor communities, and deployed in order to govern the poor through the increasingly usual discursive mix of ‘empowerment’ and ‘responsibilization’ (see e.g., Ilcan & Lacey, 2011), complemented by an exploitation of the resulting activation of frugal creativity, as enabled by ‘co-creation’ (Cova et al., 2011; Zwick et al., 2008).

For our analysis, we draw on Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985, p. 130) concept of ‘chains of difference’ to illustrate the hegemonic formation of the governance-driven discourse of co-creating innovations with the poor. A chain of difference smoothens the differences between the elements of a discourse, preventing or preempting the expression of antagonism through for example practices of cooptation (Howarth, 2006), and thereby making it possible for differences to be tolerated or even celebrated while largely preserving or reinforcing the hegemonic order. We separate the discourses and their historical developments in a sequence for presentational purpose, although we do acknowledge their parallel and interactive character. By focusing on the unfolding of the meanings surrounding frugal innovation, we want to explore and trace the three discourses, which are reinforcing, contesting and shaping meanings associated with the concept of frugal innovation. In framing our study through discourse theoretical concepts such as ‘chain of difference’, ‘empty signifier’ and ‘floating signifier’, we contribute to the analysis of the foundational ideas and notions underpinning frugal innovation, and we expose how contemporary frugal innovation discourse serves a purpose in a hegemonic project of governing the poor in ways conducive to ‘wealth creation’ and ‘economic development’ as per mainstream, elite-driven definitions. We engage with ‘theories’ of frugal innovation and co-creation not to ‘improve’ or ‘contribute to’ them but instead to problematize their impacts and power effects. We believe there is an inherent value in problematizing and unpacking how ‘theories’ attached to hegemonic projects have undesirable effects when deployed as powerful discourses, and thus we do not pursue a ‘theoretical contribution’ to these theories. Our approach here is ‘ethico-political’ (see e.g., Bell & Willmott, 2020), and we could describe its inherently critical stance towards contemporary neoliberal hegemony as follows: we take issue with the ‘one policy fits all’ neoliberal solution of making as many people as possible ‘innovators’ and ‘entrepreneurs’ while prioritizing capital accumulation for already powerful investors and assuming that all will go well, despite the abundance of evidence over the past 50 years that such neoliberal policies lead to rising socio-economic inequalities. We show how a floating signifier with radical potential, frugal innovation, has been hijacked and co-opted in a hegemonic project that has leveraged a powerful empty signifier (co-creation) and other key signifiers (Bottom/Base of the Pyramid, partnerships, scaling up), all associated with marketing and business ethics. And to make it clear what is problematic in this hegemonic intervention, we discuss a number of critical implications of the advent of the co-creation discourse on frugal innovation.

In the next section, we introduce Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) post-Marxist discourse theory, focusing in particular on the concept of ‘chain of difference’. We then move on to our analysis of discourses on frugal innovation in relation to the sustainable innovation field of discursivity, in four parts. Our discussion is then devoted to critical implications of the current hegemonic discourse on frugal innovation.

The process of studying discourses on frugal innovation started with an aim to understand the complexities surrounding the use of the term in scholarly articles, as well as in the talks of practitioners. Managerial and academic representations on frugal innovations—as we perceived 2 years ago—were typically filled with positivity and numerous success stories, while critical perspectives on the phenomena were left out of the discussions. It was this hegemonic ambiguousness on frugal innovations that led us to explore the literature in more detail. We started by exploring the historical emergence of frugal innovation as an established concept, and continued to analyze its relationship with the broader field of discursivity of sustainable innovations. The historical study of discourses allows for the creation of distance to texts and empirical phenomena through a strategy of moving away from the centre through time. Such strategy is common in studies drawing on Laclau and Mouffe’s post-foundational discourse theory (Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002) with ambitions of drawing ethico-political implications. As Bell and Willmott (2020) suggest, rather than appealing to established technical methodological norms, dealing with ethico-political critique entails relying on ‘intellectual craftship’ (Mills, 1959) in designing an idiosyncratic methodological approach. Although Laclau and Mouffe worked little on detailed analysis of empirical materials, their concepts can be useful tools for studying empirical phenomena (Howarth, 2005; Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002). Our methodology here involved four stages which were not pre-set from the beginning since the results of the first stage warranted the next three: (1) through a genealogical problematizing literature review (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2020; Quistgaard Steensen & Villadsen, 2020), studying the historical development of the concept of frugal innovation, different discourses dealing with it, and identifying the contemporary hegemonic discourse on it; (2) analysing the differential vs. equivalential dynamics in the developments of the different discourses, in line with Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) distinction between logic of difference and logic of equivalence; (3) denaturalizing the contemporary hegemonic discourse (Fournier & Grey, 2000) by more closely studying its articulation through a chain of difference and a number of powerful ambiguous signifiers; and (4) critically reflecting on the power effects (Knights & Morgan, 1991) of the contemporary hegemonic discourse. The stages are reflected in the structure of the article as follows: stage 1 in the lengthy descriptions of each of the three main discourses; stage 2 in the relatively brief analytical comments in relation to the first two discourses, and the more extensive analysis of the third, hegemonic discourse, where it is largely combined with stage 3; and stage 4 in the discussion and conclusions section.

In the first stage of our methodology, as mentioned above, we studied the historical origins of the frugal innovation concept. This process was inspired by Foucault’s genealogical approach with an aim to describe the ‘conditions of historical appearance’ (Foucault, 2002, p. 48). We conducted a problematizing literature review (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2020) which encompassed a broad reading on the topic of frugal innovations (both academic and practitioner texts) and a more focused study of key references (see Table 1). The problematizing literature review is primarily guided by the principles of ‘reading more broadly but selectively’, ‘problematizing and not accumulating’, and ‘less is more’ (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2020, p. 1297). In the process of trying to understand the concept of frugal innovation and the conditions of its origin, we found out that (1) frugal innovation is mostly related with ‘the poor’, and (2) the key difference between discourses lies in the role assigned to ‘the poor’ in conceptualizing frugal innovation. In the early discourses on frugal innovation, there were two such roles: frugal innovation for the poor, and frugal innovation by the poor. The third role of frugal innovation with ‘the poor’ emerged later. During the more in-depth tracing of these categories within the key reference texts (see Table 1), the “for” became associated with business-driven articulations of sustainable innovations (as particularly promoted in e.g. Prahalad, 2006; Prahalad & Hart, 2002), the “by” chiefly related to community-driven grassroots innovation articulations (as studied in e.g. Gupta, 2006; Pansera & Sarkar, 2016; Smith et al., 2014), and the latest “with” was something that we termed governance-driven articulations (as discussed in e.g.; Karnani, 2007; Radjou & Prabhu, 2014; Simanis & Hart, 2009).

Thus, we focused on key texts which we found to represent each of the three discourses. While reading the texts for the third, governance-driven discourse, it became clear that an important signifier was the notion of co-creation. We found that this signifier seems to tie together the categories of “for” and “by”, thus creating a powerful empty signifier which is difficult to criticize or circumvent.

In the second and third stages of our methodology, we gradually move from a descriptive approach to a more analytical one. In those stages, we work more explicitly with Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) discourse theoretical concepts such as the logics of equivalence and difference (second stage) and empty and other ambiguous signifiers (third stage) in order to analyze the dynamics in the developments of the different discourses on the business-driven (previously philanthropy-driven) innovation for the poor; the community-driven innovation by the poor; and the governance-driven innovation with the poor. Within management and organization studies, a number of scholars have been inspired by Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) post-foundational discourse theory to investigate organizational phenomena with the conceptual tools provided by this theoretical approach (e.g., Islam et al., 2017; Kelly, 2013; Kenny & Bushnell, 2020; Kenny & Scriver, 2012; Nyberg & Wright, 2012; O’Doherty, 2015; Smolović Jones et al., 2020; Spicer & Böhm, 2007; Spicer & Sewell, 2010; Zueva & Fairbrass, 2019). By discourse, Laclau and Mouffe (1985, p. 105) refer to a “structured totality resulting from [an] articulatory practice”, that is, “any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified”. In other words, an articulatory practice may lead to a change of meanings by modifying the identity of elements, yet it does not become a discourse until it is also characterized by a degree of ‘fixation’ in meaning (Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002). When articulatory practice modifies the meanings of elements, some of the meanings of those elements become fixed, transforming these elements into what Laclau and Mouffe (1985) call ‘moments’. However, the degree of fixation of meaning is never absolute; instead, meanings are contingent upon possible different (re)articulations of discourses.

In this study, ‘frugal innovation’ is studied as a floating signifier; that is, different discourses engaging with the signifier ‘frugal innovation’ fill it with different meanings. ‘Co-creation’ is understood in this study as an empty signifier (Laclau, 1996), “meaning that it acts as a kind of anchoring and connective word that threads together the moments [and other ambiguous signifiers] that assemble [the now hegemonic] discourse” (Smolović Jones et al., 2020, p. 539) on frugal innovation, that of frugal innovation with the poor. What we mean by ‘key signifiers’ in this study refers to the other ambiguous signifiers that are other nodes in the discourse, such as ‘Base of the Pyramid’ and ‘partnership’; they are not ‘moments’ since their ambiguity remains and contributes to the chain of difference.

Two other central notions of Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) discourse theory are the logic of equivalence and the logic of difference, the inspiration of which come from linguistics but which are applied to hegemonic or counter-hegemonic projects in the social realm. Contu et al., (2013, pp. 369–370) explain that “in the social domain, the elements [subjected to these logics] are social groups, their words and actions” and that “in the logic of equivalence, one element ‘a’, while still holding its particularity, comes to incarnate something that metaphorically brings together (i.e. makes equivalent) all the other elements ‘b’, ‘c’, and ‘d’ constituting a chain of equivalence that articulates a collective will”. Thus, they note that this connective element (an empty signifier) is akin to what in linguistics is called synecdoche, as in one element standing for the whole. For such different elements to become ‘equivalent’, there needs to be an outside that threatens all the elements and against which all the elements are framed. Thus, ‘chains of equivalence’ typically form against a constitutive outside (see Laclau, 1996), and they particularly characterize counter-hegemonic movements framed against an established order. For example, successful populist movements tend to rely on chains of equivalence by being united against the elites or the establishment (Laclau, 2005; see also de Cleen et al., 2018).

In contrast, the logic of difference refers to a process where different elements a, b, and c remain differentially positioned but somehow are structured in a chain, as part of the same system anyway (Contu et al., 2013). Thus, chains of difference deliver a smoothing effect, as the differences between the elements, rather than expressed through antagonism, get to be tolerated or even celebrated. At the heart of such chains, there typically is a “logic of pre-emption in which the possibilities of conflict are forestalled before they are able to become antagonistic constructs [for example through] practices of cooptation…” (Howarth, 2006, p. 114; emphases in the original). Thus, such chains may develop dynamically as a result of a challenge to the hegemonic block or simply an attempt to consolidate a hegemonic order through a hegemonic project extending the reach of the hegemonic block. In these cases, a chain of difference might develop as a result of a discourse that to some extent succeeds at re-legimizing the hegemonic order, for example through arguing for a differentiated win–win–win for differentiated groups in society (see e.g., Fougère et al., 2017).

Both types of chains need powerful empty signifiers in order to be established and sustained. While a chain of equivalence needs an empty signifier often based on synecdoche and while the equivalence comes from a common difference to an outside, a chain of difference needs different kinds of signifiers, signifiers that draw connections between different identities—and between different demands—not by making them equivalent in their common difference to an outside but by affirming their difference to one another. Thus, while the signifiers establishing and sustaining chains of difference might be just as ambiguous as empty signifiers associated with chains of equivalence, their main function is not to create equivalence but to connect differences with one another. While to date there has been a paucity of research on exactly how empty signifiers work in establishing chains of difference, one intuition from Contu et al. (2013) is that the kind of empty signifier needed might be akin to a tertium quid, that is, an “unknown or indefinite thing related in some way to two [or more] known or definite things, but distinct from both[/all]” (Collins, 2021).

Both chains of equivalence and chains of difference are closely connected to the notion that every discourse competes for hegemony within a field of discursivity, attempting to dominate this field (Torfing, 1999). While discourses that are already dominant often rely on a chain of difference, where societal differences are institutionalized in a hegemonic order, counter-hegemonic discourses typically rely on as broad as possible chains of equivalence in order to stand a chance in challenging the hegemonic block (see e.g., Fougère & Solitander, 2020; Kenny & Bushnell, 2020). In order to hegemonize the field of discursivity a discourse needs to establish a chain (of difference or equivalence) that fixes the meaning of key ‘floating signifiers’ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985), i.e. those signifiers whose meanings differ from one discourse to another. In this paper, ‘frugal innovation’ can be understood as a floating signifier whose meaning varies across discourses—such as in business-driven discourses on sustainable innovation vs. community-driven discourses on sustainable innovation. Hegemony can be argued to be established if a single discourse succeeds in standing in for the whole field of discursivity. In this context, the discourses on ‘innovations for the poor’ and ‘grassroots innovations by the poor’ become undermined from the discursive field of sustainable innovations, from which the ‘co-creation with the poor’ overpowers or dissolves them by rearticulating their elements through a chain of difference (Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002).While a hegemonic discourse can be strongly naturalized as the one established way to understand a particular aspect of reality, it is never absolute, otherwise it would mean that we would not be able to see its contingency as ‘hegemony’, but rather as fully ‘objective’ discourse (e.g., Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002). For example, sustainable development discourse as institutionalized through the SDGs has a vocation to be hegemonic. While it is difficult to resist its injunction to frame all sustainability endeavours in terms of SDGs, it is nevertheless not impossible to see SDGs as contingent articulations, which may be contested. Indeed, a feature of hegemony is that because of its contingent nature, it does not exist without resistance (e.g., Burawoy, 1979; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). Given that hegemony for Laclau and Mouffe (1985) is inherently unstable, once provisionally established it necessitates discursive work to maintain and reproduce it (Spicer & Sewell, 2010).

In our study of discourses on frugal innovation, we set out to look into what discourse today is closest to what could be called a hegemonic discourse on sustainable innovation, and what meaning frugal innovation is assigned within such discourse.

Our discourse analysis focuses in turn on: (1) ‘sustainable innovation’ as an evolving field of discursivity; (2) different relevant historical articulations of sustainable innovations for the poor; (3) relevant articulations of sustainable innovations by the poor; and (4) more recent articulations of sustainable innovations with the poor, which seem to be successful at creating a chain of difference through frugal innovation, indebted to the ‘co-creation’ empty signifier and other key signifiers.

In this paper we have analysed how the recently popularized concept of frugal innovation has gained meaning through the business-driven, community-driven and governance-driven discourses on sustainable innovation. By analyzing these discourses as developing innovations for the poor, by the poor and with the poor we were able to trace a hegemonic re-arrangement involving different visions of frugal innovations. By accommodating interests from both the business- and community-driven discourses on sustainable innovation, the governance-driven discourse on co-creating frugal innovations with the poor is becoming hegemonic, and it seemingly is being successful in securing new benefits for the elites while promoting neoliberal entrepreneurialism for the poor. Our contribution lies in exposing the particular role of ‘co-creation’ as a powerful empty signifier originating from business studies. This signifier acquired co-optive power within the field of marketing (Zwick et al., 2008) and later was successfully imported into the discussion on frugal innovation, particularly via the BoP approach (also originating from strategic marketing) and as a way to bridge that approach with one framed as more win–win and more governance-oriented. What we believe is particularly novel in our analysis, at least within the fields of business and society and critical management studies, is how we unpack the role of particular signifiers in establishing and sustaining a chain of difference—in previous studies the role of empty signifiers in relation to chains of equivalence has been foregrounded, but not that in relation to chains of difference, even in those articles that discuss examples of chains of difference (Contu et al., 2013; Nyberg et al., 2018). ‘Co-creation’ works for the chain of difference because it is connective as any empty signifier should be, but it does not create equivalence. Instead it merely connects very different parties involved in frugal innovation from top-down and bottom-up perspectives, and plays the role of a tertium quid, an indefinite signifier that connects a number of definite signifiers, while distinct from all of them. In forming the chain, it is assisted not so much by definite ‘moments’ but instead by a number of other signifiers that are used in an ambiguous manner for the purpose of claiming benefits for all while keeping them differentiated, such as BoP, embeddedness, inclusion, partnership and scaling up.

It is not the first time that ideas associated with marketing and business ethics are shown to become powerful signifiers in the context of national and transnational governance—for example business-NGO partnerships (Laasonen et al., 2012), CSR (Zueva & Fairbrass, 2019) and multi-stakeholder initiatives (Fougère & Solitander, 2020) all have been discussed as signifiers from business studies with an impact on broader societal governance. Neither is it the first time that co-optive dimensions of empty signifiers have been discussed in business studies—a previous example being workplace mindfulness (Islam et al., 2017). But in contrast with previous studies, our focus is also on the dynamic discursive interactions between several signifiers in a particular hegemonic intervention. Through this intervention, a floating signifier with radical potential, frugal innovation, has been hijacked and co-opted in a hegemonic project that has leveraged several other powerful ambiguous signifiers such as co-creation, BoP, partnerships, which are associated with marketing and business ethics. We believe that rather than contributing to business theories that have problematic power effects, exposing those effects is a particularly worthy endeavour that is a contribution in its own right.

Thus, our analysis urges us to be vigilant to a number of critical implications of the advent of the hegemonic co-creation discourse on frugal innovation. First, the inherent positivity of frugal innovations framed as win–wins (Meagher, 2018) combined with their corporate-friendly articulation may become yet another lever—besides philanthropy, CSR, business-NGO or multi-stakeholder partnerships, etc.—for corporations to reclaim legitimacy by delivering ‘development’ in environments where their social license to operate has been challenged (Böhm & Brei, 2008; Moog et al., 2015). For example, in the context of India, a company like Coca Cola, often strongly criticized for its negative impacts on local communities living near its production facilities, has been very happy to share its distribution channels with a social business called ‘ColaLife’ in order to distribute a package of frugal innovations that help fighting child mortality in remote communities (see Nari Kahle et al., 2013). This possibility of reclaiming corporate legitimacy through support for scaling up frugal innovations is often supported by national STI policies enforcing broader discursive legitimations for inclusive innovations for and with the poor, as in the case of India.

Second, following insights from critical marketing and critical management studies (Cova et al., 2011, 2015a; Gabriel et al., 2015; Zwick et al., 2008), one cannot but think of the possibilities of exploitation that come with ‘co-creation’. Specifically in this context, what is likely to happen based on the new hegemonic understanding of frugal innovation is a heightened extraction, exploitation and scaling up of ‘creative sustainability value’ from individuals or communities. The grassroots co-innovators tend not to readily have access to ways to protect their frugal innovations (such as patents or other forms of legal protection), notably because they typically work in the ‘informal sector’—while formal economic actors increasingly reap the benefits of frugal innovation (for a detailed description of how this happens, see Meagher, 2018).

Third, relatedly but going beyond mere exploitation of creativity, the hegemonization of sustainable innovation along the lines of co-creation can be seen as inscribed in a broader biopolitical project of governing the poor through including them more strongly in the market realm as entrepreneurs (see Varman et al., 2012) or, as BoP proponents would say, ‘consumer-entrepreneurs’ (Prahalad, 2006), thanks to the increasingly usual discursive mix of ‘empowerment’ and ‘responsibilization’ (see e.g., Ilcan & Lacey, 2011). In this project, co-creation is a key signifier for articulating an illusory win–win (Meagher, 2018). Here, the resulting further activation of frugal creativity, as enabled by ‘co-creation’, both heightens the possibilities of exploitation discussed above and is meant to serve as an engine for economic growth.

Fourth, and again relatedly, this reliance on entrepreneurs and markets to provide the solutions for challenges related to poverty also means that the state is assumed to be redundant in addressing these challenges. This is particularly harmful since the state uses its championing of co-creation frugal initiatives to justify reductions in welfare interventions—all while inequalities are heightened by the new entrepreneurial logic (Varman et al., 2012). As Meagher (2018) concludes, countering the disempowering effects of frugal co-creation for informal actors instead should entail much greater mobilization of the state. Similarly to social innovation in the EU (Fougère et al., 2017), frugal innovation in developing countries tends to be used in policy as a way to legitimize a less redistributive state.

That said, the openness of the hegemonic discourse means that it remains contested, and thus the emancipatory—and subversive—potential of frugal innovation should not be assumed to be completely lost. The idea of frugal innovation has arguably contributed to a more diverse understanding of the process of innovation. With close connections to the literature on grassroots innovations, it has created appreciation for the local embeddedness of innovations, and the value of solutions developed by people residing where the problems themselves are located (Gupta et al., 2003; Smith et al., 2014). It furthermore has challenged the notion of innovations as primarily outcomes of resource-intensive processes and the exclusive domain of economies in the global North with budgets to fund large investments in the development of technology (Kaplinsky, 2011). As frugal innovations have been celebrated, the dominant view seeing economies in the global South as mere recipients of technology has partially shifted, and the possibility for ‘Southern’ innovations to be inspirational for the counterparts in global North has been acknowledged (Bound & Thornton, 2012; Fougère & Harding, 2012). And one learning that people embedded in different localities around the world could get from the original grassroots articulations of frugal innovation could relate to the need of using those highly context-dependent resources that are locally at hand, in a frugal manner, rather than relying for everything on the global marketplace, which is the main reason for how overwhelmingly unsustainable our world has become. Most importantly, the fact that the discourse remains contested also means that by drawing on its original grassroots articulations, it remains possible to imagine a translocal counter-hegemonic movement calling for much more of the benefits of frugal innovation to be allocated by and to the poor, on their own terms.