Hello! Amanda here from Think team!
In my first few weeks in su-re.co, I remember feeling intrigued when I first learned about frugal innovation. The term seem unfamiliar to me, and from my understanding I thought it was just a different term for low cost design concept. To feed into my curiosity and to fully learn how su-re.co carried out this innovation strategy, I read more into it through this book titled Fugal Innovation: How to Do Better with Less by Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu. I am glad I did. I learned that I was barely correct. Although low cost does take part of it, there are more values that frugal innovator strive to create. Frugal design innovation does not only value to be cost and resource efficient to simply cut cost of production but it upholds these attributes to product good-quality product that deliver high customer value for wider consumer market. Why? because in the end, the business would not survive without providing and tapping into wider customer market, that initially provide life for the business to begin with (Paul Polman). so, how does su-re.co fit into this?
According to Radjou and Prabhu, there are several capabilities that must be cultivated to support the market focused, and agile model of frugal innovations. One that I think fit su-re.co the most is adapt rapidly to unexpected changes. As you may have read in many of our team's blogs, su-re.co shifts so quickly as the world did. Not only projects, and products but also culture and management. For instance, online meetings have been so frequent that sometime the purpose of it blurred by the hours of reporting that could've been an email and off-topic brainstorming. I definitly learned much of this after couple of company retreats and moderating events, that sometime end up with no clear results. The hours spent on this became a delay in hours we could have improve the solutions to our problem or develop a new one. So with the direction taken by our CEO, we shifted towards a more nimble approach where we dont entirely focused and deliver on the best of the best end product/ solution, but seek in good enough solutions that can test it out faster and constantly iterate and improve them based on customer insights and feedback from the team members - or sometimes executing the wrong idea and move on to the next best thing and opportunity faster. Although frugal innovation is not technically a management technique, its attributes could definitely be beneficial in applying through our everyday work culture to provide a more sustainable and affordable good quality solutions!
That's it for now ;) Thank you for reading, and I hope to share more with you as I learn through my days in su-re.co and from more books !
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