Leveraging a Process-Oriented Perspective on Frugal Innovation Through the Linkage of Lean Product Development (LPD) Practices and Waste

Frugal innovation aims to attain significantly cheaper solutions on the market. The literature points out a lack of studies addressing frugal innovation from a process-oriented (ex-ante) perspective, as well as how to structure and leverage the frugal product development process. This paper explores how lean principles and fundamentals, and more particularly lean product development (LPD) can help fill this gap. The incidence of different types of waste has been observed throughout the new product development (NPD) process, and their mitigation could certainly leverage frugal innovation from the process perspective. However, to operationalize waste mitigation, an evaluation of how different types of waste are related to the various existing LPD practices is necessary. We accordingly build a relationship matrix between LPD practices and waste mitigation throughout the NPD process, based on a literature review encompassing 310 studies. By correlating LPD practices and waste, this paper proposes and discusses a conceptual model that brings insights to understanding how LPD can drive frugal innovations from an ex-ante perspective. The contributions of this paper are the categorization and classification of waste within NPD; the assessment and classification of the lean practices most studied in the literature; the association of the categories of waste with the corresponding lean practices; and the discussion of the possible contribution of LPD literature to leverage frugal innovation from a process-oriented perspective.