Towards a design for frugal: review of implications for product design

Since 2010 the concept of frugal innovation has increasingly attracted the attention of both researchers and industry. Frugal innovation holds much promise in the rapidly changing global economy. It has been suggested that this approach needs to be understood by product designers in order to integrate it into product development and bring frugal products into the market place. This research aims to review the current literature on frugal innovation and identify characteristics and methodologies for designing frugal products that has been proposed until now. Our review has analysed 28 journal articles. The results have found 10 design principles and 2 design methodologies that have been developed to achieve frugal products. More research has to be carried out to relate these methods with product development theories and understand the impact for product design practice

Towards a Conceptual Framework for Social Wellbeing through Inclusive Frugal ICT innovation in Postcolonial Collectivist contexts

Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) researchers regard ICT innovation as critical to the social wellbeing of the marginalized in developing countries. However, an understanding of how various political, economic and socio-cultural contexts enable or constrain the influence of inclusive frugal ICT innovation on the marginalized in developing countries remains inadequate. Inclusive frugal ICT innovation refers to increasingly popular approach of creating goods and services using ICTs under constraints specifically to enhance the wellbeing of marginalized millions in developing countries. While Sen’s capability approach (SCA) is widely praised for its human centric view of wellbeing, it has been criticized for being individualistic as well as over-optimistic about human wellbeing in the context of disempowering sociopolitical contexts. This research proposes a conceptual framework that provides a holistic perspective of collective social wellbeing based on the pan-African concept of Ubuntu (shared interdependence). This framework makes use of the philosophical perspective of critical social research to better explain the interrelationship between inclusive ICT innovation aimed at empowering the marginalized through inclusion and the context and social wellbeing, particularly the pervasive postcolonial context

Digital Frugality for Managerial Tasks: Three-way Interaction Effects of Redundancy of Software on Techno-stressors

In this research, we study how non-frugal organizational IT practices can affect employee well-being in completing managerial tasks. Building on the conservation of resource theory, we will examine a three-way interaction effect of the redundancy of required skills, required resources, and obtained results on technology-driven stressors. Data was collected from 357 managers to analyze the proposed three-way interaction effect for techno-overload, techno-complexity, techno- invasion, techno-insecurity, and techno-uncertainty. This article highlights the importance of being frugal – that is, acknowledging and diminishing redundancy among ICT assets and usage within organizations - for reducing technostress among employees

Design and Instantiation of IS2SAVE: An Information System to Predict the Influx of Spontaneous Volunteers at Operating Sites

Disaster managers are in charge of encountering natural disasters, yet, more often supported by citizens, so-called spontaneous volunteers. Their help has repeatedly been reported to be valuable for reducing disaster scales, regarding an increase in natural disasters occurrences with devastating effects. However, their characteristic to emerge in large groups has led to an unpredictable influx at operating sites from the perspective of disaster management. Finally, this led to problems such as congestions and blocked emergency routes, overcrowded operating sites and hampering officials in doing their work. To address this unpredictability, we apply a design science research approach to design and develop an information system to predict the influx of spontaneous volunteers at operating sites. We examine three design requirements and ten design principles, that we instantiate in a prototype. We finally validate our design theory empirically with experts, who positively highlight its perceived usefulness, conciseness, extendibility, explanatory power

A Frugal Support Structure for New Software Implementations in SMEs

During software implementations, budgetary and human resource constraints often make it difficult for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to provide and maintain the required support. To overcome these constraints, this study describes a frugal support structure (FSS) to orchestrate available resources and to involve users as suppliers and co-creators of contextualized information. The FSS is conceptualized as a system that enables interaction and collaboration between the actors involved by using extant communication infrastructure wherever possible, systematizing and centralizing knowledge created and ensuring overall resource and time efficiency. Adopting a design science research process, development of the FSS combines a literature review and practical insights. Evaluating the challenges and benefits of FSS, the findings indicate that user involvement is necessary not only for contextualized and accessible support but to make support structures more frugal and sustainable in the long term

Constructing Frugal Sales System for Small Enterprises

In the current study, the authors report on the application of the design science methodology to construct, utilize, and evaluate a frugal information system that uses mobile devices and cloud computing resources for documenting daily sales transactions of very small enterprises (VSEs). Small enterprises play significant roles in the socioeconomic landscape of a community by providing employment opportunities and contributing to the gross domestic product. However, VSEs have very little access to innovative information technologies that could help them manage their challenges that are restricting their effective growth, sustainability, and participation in a knowledge economy. The results of a field-evaluation experiment, involving 22 VSE entrepreneurs using a newly constructed system, MobiSales, disclosed that user behavior, which demonstrates confidence, excitement, enthusiasm, energy, and trust varied when employing a mobile electronic device for social interactions, as compared to using it for business transactions

Digital Innovation: A Frugal Ecosystem Perspective

In this conceptual paper, we attempt to answer the question: How do firms develop frugal IT capabilities in a resource-constrained ecosystem? Frugal firms tend to successfully overcome severe infrastructure, financial, social, and technological constraints. Frugal IT Innovation” is a special case of frugal innovation where IT/IS play a pivotal, core role in enabling capabilities to overcome challenges of resource-constrained business environments. It is centered on development of products/services with a sharp focus on affordability, simplicity, and sustainability. Taking a digital ecodynamics perspective, we focus on the co-evolution of firm-level capabilities, the frugal ecosystem, and underlying IT systems to uncover how a dynamic, higher-order, frugal IT innovation capability (FITIC) drives firm performance. Due to unique ecosystem conditions, we measure firm performance by including social and environmental measures in addition to financial measures. The paper discusses ecosystem-wide implications and contributes to advancement of both theoretical and practice-based knowledge in this domain

A Methodology for Context—Specific Information Systems Design Theorizing

Prescriptive knowledge constitutes one of the important contributions of information systems design theorizing in information systems (IS) research. Existing methods for IS design theorizing apply kernel/reference theories as sources of justificatory knowledge that serve to justify and validate the knowledge produced. This has gaps in guiding how specific contexts of stakeholders and their practices can be entertained in the design process. This research attempts to address the above void, taking a socio-technically complex agricultural extension information service and the contexts that define it into account. The research builds on an existing IS design theory framework and shows how it can be improved by incorporating context into its components. It contributes to theory by adapting the existing frameworks using contextual insights from the local development practices and the stakeholders’ conditions. It in turn contributes to practice by developing a context-specific knowledge that can guide practitioners engaged in rolling out information and communication technology for development interventions in such environments

Unlocking the Potential of Information Communications Technology to Improve Water and Sanitation Services: Summary of Findings and Recommendations

This study provides evidence on how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can be used to leapfrong the water and sanitation sector towards more sustainable service delivery. It sought to not only document experiences of Information and Communication Technology use in the WASH sector, but also analyze them within the framework of enabling factors and barriers in terms of vision, process, customer/user, service delivery, human capacity, governance and finance