This article was taken from the August 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Too much of what we revere as innovation merely proliferates products, styles and services in an increasingly baroque display of creativity. This does nothing to meet our needs. We can no longer afford innovation as proliferation.
We have created a new context for innovation: the explosion of demand from billions of aspirational developing-world consumers; tight constraints on supplies of water, energy and other resources; the stagnation of the incomes of middle-income households in the developing world. These pressures are forcing us to adopt a frugal model of innovation to provide better solutions for more people by using fewer resources (see Wired issue 05.13).
That is what Devi Shetty did in Bangalore to create the world's leanest low-cost hospital, which provides heart operations at a fraction of the price of those in the developed world. Madhav Chavan and his team in Mumbai found a way to educate pre-school children for just $10 (£6) a year. Pedro Yrigoyen in Mexico City developed a mobile phone-based healthcare system used by five million Mexicans and which costs just $5 a month. In Australia, innovators inspired by the British inventor Charlie Paton are creating water out of thin air, via desalination systems that use solar power.
In labs and design studios around the world, a new generation of social designers is creating low-cost products that meet the needs of cash-strapped consumers. Many of them are adapting mobile phones and their networks to create banking infrastructures or a test for anaemia. A resurgent do-it-together movement of makers, hobbyists and craft producers is spreading thanks to the Arduino motherboard, the Raspberry Pi and 3D printers. Many of the most important frugal innovations will not be standalone products and services but new systems. These will emerge from frugal cities around the world.
Singapore solved a water crisis by turning itself into a giant distributed urban reservoir, recycling as much water as possible and desalinating seawater. Havana has learned how to feed itself from small plots within the city. Freiburg in Germany has created low-cost and shared housing enabling families on modest incomes to live well.
Frugal innovators make tight constraints work for them by using them to turn conventional wisdom on its head. They make the most of marginal markets, overlooked by large companies and where resources are scarce, to rethink traditional, costly, top-heavy business models.
They eschew cutting-edge technology, preferring to do radical things with proven technologies that are known to work, are familiar to consumers and easy to maintain. They excel at innovation as a process of rethinking, rather than as pure invention: they recycle, reuse, repurpose, remediate.
Such frugal innovation will not be the only approach to innovation in the future. But it will be the most important, because it offers a way to create a successful, inclusive and sustainable innovation-driven economy. Lean and simple, clean and social: those will be the design principles of the frugal future.
Charles Leadbeater is a journalist and a former adviser to Tony Blair. He wrote The Frugal Innovator.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
