Affecting over-engineering with elements and factors of frugal innovations

Abstract

This thesis focuses on frugal innovations and over-engineering in the mobile phone industry and medical industry. These industries often over-engineer their products and services. For the mobile phone industry, businesses strive to give ever-improving products and services to their most profitable and demanding customers while paying less attention to others who are less demanding. In reality, firms’ over-engineered products/services often beat less-demanding customers’ performance standards. On the other hand, over-engineering medical equipment is due to owing to standards and regulations. This makes it more difficult for people to access medical equipment. Not everyone can afford it and not everyone is capable of operating such sophisticated equipment. Frugal innovations aim to strive to lower the cost of products, services and systems for the Bottom of the Pyramid. To (partially) solve the problem described, the research objective for this thesis is to investigate the factors of frugal innovations to affect over-engineering in the mobile phone industry and for medical equipment in the medical industry by means of two case studies.