Lead Market India

The topic of frugal innovation is increasingly gaining relevance in social as well as scholarly discourse. Frugal innovations have been perceived by many to be a phenomenon generally confined to emerging economies where there are large groups of unserved consumers with unmet needs. But there is increasing evidence that this phenomenon is getting relevant also in the industrialized nations potentially affecting the long-term competitiveness of domestic firms not only overseas but also at home. This paper has a twofold objective: (a) It seeks to establish the theoretical antecedents of frugal innovation by examining the scholarly discourse; and (b) It attempts to generate hypotheses about its long-term relevance by examining historical trends of frugality and their disappearance. Based upon an extensive literature review and some preliminary primary data we propose a new working definition for frugal innovation and hypothesize that frugality was a key social value with positive associations before the era of unprecedented prosperity in the industrialized world, which led to saturated markets and inter alia to feature-driven competition and over-consumption of resources. New ground realities, e.g., economic downturn in the industrialized world and the rapidly rising consumption in the economically developing world, are expected to turn frugality, once again, into an important societal value and frugal innovation into a critical success factor in mid-term future.

In recent years a phenomenon called “frugal innovation” has increasingly gained traction in the scholarly discourse; and as research reveals, it is often brought in connection with India. Apparently, India has quietly acquired the role of a pioneer for innovations that aim at combining affordability with excellence, cutting across sectoral boundaries. But what is it that makes India a forerunner for an innovation paradigm with increasing global relevance? In this paper, I propose that the “lead market” theory can explain to a quite good extent the attractiveness of India for frugal solutions. On one hand, there are concrete economic factors that give rise to resource-efficient and affordable solutions to problems faced in day-to-day life. On the other hand, frugality has been long regarded as a virtuous social value in India and the socio-cultural context of the country provides a fertile environment for the acceptance of frugal products and services on both demand and supply sides.

This paper, apart from dwelling on the concept of lead markets and its application in the context of frugal innovations in India, also presents some qualitative results of an empirical survey conducted by the author with participation of Indian students that underscore the role of culture as a key determinant for the acceptance of frugal innovation by relevant stakeholders.

Among all the innovation strategies that seek to impact developing economies, Grassroots Innovation remains the least explored. With critics of Bottom of the Pyramid literature articulating the need for considering the poor as producers, a better understanding of the grassroots phenomenon may help companies to understand and integrate the Grassroots Innovation strategy into their business models and thereby allowing the poor to become producers of products and solutions. This study examines the dimensions and trends, which make Grassroots Innovations unique, as well as factors which govern and influence them.

The study is based on in-depth case studies which were gathered during field work with the National Innovation Foundation in India. The data illustrates how factors like education, age, occupation and sector influence the triggers and the outcomes of Grassroots Innovations. It also demonstrates how individuals, institutions and firms could collaborate to commercialize these products and solutions.

Innovative, distinct products and no “cheaper” copies of the “rich” world are essential in order to succeed at the “Base of the Pyramid” (BoP). However, this type of innovation requires more, in-depth information on the BoP and solution spaces, which are both difficult to access. Literature proposes to generate innovations bottom up through user involvement but remains silent on how to identify and integrate BoP consumers into the innovation process. One obvious solution is to connect up with and cooperate with innovating consumers of the BoP. However, this raises the questions whether (1) user innovation exists at the BoP at what levels of quality and (2) how firms can support the innovators to implement them into real world solutions. In this paper we specifically address the first question and analyze patterns and characteristics of a large sample of innovations developed by people living at the Indian BoP collected by the Indian National Innovation Foundation (NIF). We compare these innovations to consumer innovations in the developed world and examine effects of demographic, knowledge and context factors on innovation activity and the outcome. We find similarities with consumer innovation in the developed world and at the same time adaptations to the BoP context, e.g. fulfillment of rather basic necessities than hobby-related needs. Innovation quality is mostly driven by the innovator’s knowledge and market recognition is highest for creative innovations developed for others. The paper further shows that consumer innovations are a good starting point for firms seeking solutions for BoP markets. Product needs can be systematically deducted and provide insights on how to identify promising consumer innovators at the BoP. Finally, this research contributes to better understand user innovation behavior in a specific context and by that enriches innovation research.

This study investigates the phenomenon of disruptive innovation at the base of India’s economic pyramid. We analyze firms’ ability to successfully drive disruptive innovations from within the organization through the lens of organizational ambidexterity. While consensus exists on the need for ambidexterity, the underlying mechanisms remain under-theorized. We seek to address this general gap in the research of organizational ambidexterity. This work looks at the mechanisms of ambidexterity at GE Healthcare to help explain its ability in successfully hosting sustaining and disruptive innovations from within its boundaries. This work contributes to the emerging disruptive innovation theory, by exploring organizational designs required by incumbent firms to deal with strategic challenges associated with disruptive innovations in the context of BOP markets. It also contributes to organizational ambidexterity theory by providing substantial empirical evidence from the GE Healthcare case to show how a company has adopted an ambidextrous design to deal with hosting contradictory innovation types.

Frugal products and services generally, though not exclusively, aim at satisfying the unsaturated demand of a large and growing middle class in emerging economies such as India. Although research has been conducted in regard to the strategic importance of frugal innovations, so far, there is a lack of in-depth research on the actual development process of such innovations. Some examples show that inventive analogies are used to develop frugal innovations. For instance, the development of a frugal artificial heart in India was based on the heart structure of cockroaches, which led to a reduction of costs by 20 times.

The aim of this paper is to examine the use of inventive analogies in creating frugal solutions and their impact on project results. Based on three explorative case studies from India, we generate preliminary evidence that analogies can make a significant impact on the successful development of innovations in environments that are characterized by severe resource constraints and high price-sensitivity. Furthermore, the inherent aim of frugal innovations to create radically new solutions with very restricted resources seems to stimulate the application of inventive analogies. The results point to some valuable learnings in regard to an effective employment of analogies. Besides, useful insights for companies that want to exploit market opportunities in the emerging economies are generated.

After an initial introduction into the areas of innovations within emerging markets, the study develops a consistent innovation typology for categorizing large data samples from a variety of existing literature. It then describes and finally evaluates a sample of 178 innovations for the Indian market based on 38 different criteria. It uses internet-based news reports over a 2 year timeframe for the study sample.

The study’s results show a considerable amount of radical innovations and innovations with disruptive potential among the sample and a special concentration on small- and micro-sized innovators from India. It confirms previous suggestions that India is especially focused on innovations within the software and electronics engineering sectors. The results also support the importance of local knowledge and ‘social capital’ for successful disruptive innovation. Finally, a perceivable increase in the technology orientation of innovations by foreign companies suggests a continuous build-up of local technology-competence and foreign trust in the same.

A focus on local competencies and the leading position of India concerning innovative distribution are among the managerial implication of the study. It also opens numerous avenues for future research, expanding both depth and scale of the database as well as the analysis underlying this study.

After the 2009 general elections in India a controversy started about the electronic voting machines (EVM) that are used nationwide since 2004. Political parties, activists, and academics raised suspicion that the machines might have been manipulated to alter the election outcome. There is no proof that EVMs have been manipulated in any of the past elections. However, concerned people claim that the risk is there. This paper takes a closer look at the Indian voting machine technology and the discussions around alleged security holes. The authors take a closer look at this particular controversy. Additionally, we want to provide the reader with information about the Indian electronic voting system more generally. This includes reasons to change from the earlier paper ballot system and design challenges for EVM in the Indian context. We are writing within the frame of a theoretical model called Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), developed by Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch (1987). Along the lines of this model we argue that after the EVM was adopted in India, different “relevant social groups” interpreted the EVM in diverse ways. From the social constructivist perspective, we argue that there has been not just one but rather at least three different EVMs. With time the “interpretative flexibility” diminished and “relevant social groups” more or less agreed on one interpretation of the EVM. The EVM has “stabilized” and the controversy has been closed basically. We show the SCOT model to be helpful for structuring the controversy in a fruitful manner. The research questions addressed here are: How did the ECI and EVM manufacturers react to allegations made by political parties, VeTA, and voting security researchers that EVMs are vulnerable to manipulation? How was the election practice affected?

Adopting Renewable Energy (RE) has become a necessity for achieving different development goals, for a fast growing economy and a demographically young country like India. At the same time intense Research and Development (R&D) and business activity in the domestic RE sector has become necessary to ensure the spread, affordability and efficacy of RE according to local needs. In a rapidly connecting and increasingly inter-dependent world, collaborative activities on an international level are important to finance growth, gain technical knowledge and promote cost effective manufacturing in a relatively new sector such as RE. Studying different types of collaborations e.g. manufacturing and R&D etc. while keeping focus on the future of RE in India is therefore important to understand business opportunities. At the same time capturing a larger picture of the situation in RE sector while focusing on the influence of different aspects on foreign collaboration e.g. policy influence on investment or on collaborative R&D is certainly needed to understand the challenges.

India is the seventh largest producer of commercial vehicles in the world. The commercial vehicle industry has grown significantly since the turn of the new millennium, which is evident from the fact that the industry could increase its sales by more than four-folds to 685,704 units in fiscal year 2015–2016 compared to 150,452 units in 2000–2001. In this study we analyze the innovation and business profile of Indian commercial vehicle industry. The study is based on indicators such as sales and revenues, R&D expenditure, types of innovations and their impact, open innovation activities, product portfolio and product selling points. These data were collected from annual reports, press releases and other publically available sources.

This study revealed that companies have relied mainly on product innovations compared to other types of innovations for growth. Most of these product innovations resulted in the incremental improvements of the products. These incremental innovation activities resulted in different products and variants which met growing needs of customers. In addition, various open innovation moves were made by companies which helped them to acquire new markets and increase their revenue. These innovations have arguably given a new direction to Commercial Vehicle industry in India.