Potential and Pitfalls of Frugal Innovation in the Water Sector: Insights from Tanzania to Global Value Chains

Exploring the Research Regarding Frugal Innovation and Business Sustainability through Bibliometric Analysis

Nowadays, innovation is valued as being of utmost significance when evaluating measures of sustainable development and performance constructs. The current research develops investigations into the field of frugal innovation (FI) and how this process can contribute to business sustainability. This study performs a comprehensive evaluation of scientific production through the quantitative method of bibliometric analysis to facilitate our understanding of the current structure of studies and to highlight future research paths on FI and business sustainability. The paper maps the literature by narrowing its research topics and identifying certain patterns. Using the Web of Science database (WoS) on a sample of 2072 documents, descriptive and performance analyses were conducted. The VOSviewer software was used to perform the science mapping of the conceptual, intellectual, and social structure that provides scholars with a quantified and graphic representation of the FI and business sustainability field. The trend towards the analysis of business sustainability and consumer behaviour in the context of FI is highlighted. Annual scientific production and citation analysis reveal significant growth in international interest and scientific production, indicating an increasing line of inquiry for this topic at the start of the twenty-first century. The prominent scholars in the field are of European origin, while the highly active countries in the subject of FI and business sustainability are the USA, Germany, England, the Netherlands, and India, with major collaborations across the globe. This paper covers the limits identified by previous scholars by detailing the knowledge base and by using science mapping tools to document the structure of the literature; distinguish key journals, articles, and authors; and highlight new emerging topics of research.

Resource-Constrained Innovation Method for Sustainability: Application of Morphological Analysis and TRIZ Inventive Principles

Extensive research on resource-constrained innovation has been conducted by scholars and practitioners in recent years. An interesting research avenue is how firms explore the process of the new product development (NPD) and the ideas generation to foster resource-constrained innovation. However, despite the importance of product development and creative ideas under the resource-constraints contexts, innovation methods for applying to the resource-constrained innovation and designers have received comparatively less attention. As a remedy, this paper proposes a resource-constrained innovation method (RCIM) to generate ideas for the NPD. The RCIM is mainly divided into four sections: Developing the resource-constrained innovation approaches, developing the resource-constrained innovation dimensions, generating the creative ideas and evaluating the creative ideas. First, the resource-constrained innovation algorithms are developed based on success factors, characteristics, and attributes of resource-constrained innovation and the TRIZ (Teopия Peшeния Изoбpeтaтeльcкиx Зaдaч in Russian; Theory of Inventive Problem Solving in English) inventive principles via the systematic literature review (SLR). Second, the innovation dimensions are categorized to structure a target technology by means of the morphological analysis (MA) and the Derwent manual codes (DMCs) mapping based on collected patents. Third, the creative ideas are generated for the NPD by combining the innovation dimensions with the resource-constrained innovation approaches. Finally, the creative ideas are evaluated by the frugal criteria. The RCIM will stimulate designers’ creativity for achieving sustainability and innovation within constraint-based scenarios, MA and TRIZ.

SDGs and Innovation in the Business Context Literature Review

On 25 October 2015 the United Nations approved The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). It is an important event from different points of view: clear judgment was expressed on the unsustainability of current development models, not only on the environmental level, but also on the economic and social ones. The implementation of the agenda requires a strong involvement of all members of society, especially business. The article aims to provide a literature overview on the relationships between innovation and sustainable development objectives in the industrial context. SDGs are also analyzed in terms of stakeholders involved, reactions of companies and citizens and metrics recently proposed by researchers of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC). These preliminary results show that different stakeholders approach the SDGs differently, but also that the interest of companies toward SDGs is growing, confirming the considerations that emerged in literature. Furthermore, some SDGs appear to be more a prerequisite for achieving targets, than actual goals, while innovation has proven to be a driver for most SDGs.