Importance Of Frugal Innovators

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The mindset of frugality is very fundamental to frugal innovators in the emerging economies. Such mindset is a rational response to the pervasive scarcity in the environment of these emerging markets. Frugal entrepreneurs face scarcity of every possible kind. Firstly, they must contend with the scarcity of capital. The availability of financial resources in emerging markets is limited. Banks are conservative, and venture capital and angel investor networks underdeveloped. Secondly, frugal innovators must deal with the scarcity of natural resources. Raw materials in emerging markets – from water to electricity – are expensive and hard to obtain reliably. Third, frugal entrepreneurs face a scarcity of qualified talent. Emerging markets like India, …show more content…

This consumer base, especially BOP, has low disposable incomes. This forces entrepreneurs to radically rethink the price points. Their offerings have to be extremely affordable. These consumers are also very value conscious. They reject new offerings that do not deliver significantly higher values than existing offerings do. This again puts a lot of pressure on frugal entrepreneurs to develop higher value offerings at a lower price. Finally, consumer base in emerging markets is very huge and diverse. To cater to these non-homogeneous consumers, frugal innovators need to find ways to deliver both economies of scale & scope in whatever they …show more content…

In early 2000s, when mobile revolution was taking off in India, Airtel was short on both the capital and the technology it needed to scale up its business. Airtel’s chairman, Sunil Mittal decided to use a frugal approach of doing more with less by deciding to outsource all but key marketing and branding activities to partner companies that had capital or technology or both. IBM manages Airtel’s IT infrastructure while Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Network (NSN) manages its network infrastructure. Today, Airtel is the world’s largest asset-free telecom service provider. Its frugal operating model enables it to deliver better value to its customers at lesser

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