Giving Compass' Take:

• Civil society organizations and governments may want to engage in frugal innovation through reuse, repurpose, recomb, and rapid strategies to respond to the COVID-19 crisis effectively. 

• How can donors support these strategies? How has frugal innovation worked well in other countries to build inclusive responses? 

• Read about the impact of COVID-19 on small businesses in the developing world. 

Faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, civil society organizations and governments around the world have been caught off guard. As they continue to struggle to respond, a concept known as frugal innovation may help them develop better and cheaper solutions at the rapid pace that is essential to controlling the spread of the disease.

Over the past decade, we have researched and written about frugal innovation—sometimes referred to as jugaad—in various sectors around the world, including health care. As the COVID-19 crisis continues to unfold, the co-creation of such innovations among health care practitioners and ordinary people is at an all-time high. For instance, Germany’s government hosted an open innovation hackathon involving more than 26,000 people to identify responses to the pandemic. The solutions typically fall into three broad areas: prevention (such as protective gear, hygiene, and social distancing), services and technology (such as devices, new procedures, and pop-up hospitals), and potential cures (vaccines and drug development).

Our analysis of many of these responses suggests that they apply four underlying principles of frugal innovation: reuse, repurpose, recombine, and, informing all of the others, rapidity. Organizations can use these principles to help address challenges arising during and after the pandemic.

  1. Reuse This entails finding available but outdated resources and using them in new ways without requiring much alteration.
  2. Repurpose This involves altering a currently valuable resource to serve an originally unintended purpose.
  3. Recombine This describes the mixing of resources, processes and practices among nonprofit organizations, governments, and for-profit businesses across different industries.
  4. Rapidity In the face of a fast-moving virus that becomes exponentially deadlier the longer it goes unchecked, interventions that move more quickly will be more useful.

Read the full article about frugal innovation by Yasser Bhatti, Jaideep Prabhu & Matthew Harris at Stanford Social Innovation Review.