The science underlying frugal-innovations should not be frugal
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Bioinspired materials, Materials Science (other)
- Keywords
- advanced frugal innovation; sustainable development, factor of safety; factor of frugality, factor of frugality, advanced frugal innovations, grassroots frugal innovations, sustainable develpment
- Copyright
- © 2019 Rao
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. The science underlying frugal-innovations should not be frugal. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27572v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27572v1
Abstract
In recent years frugal products of the grassroots and advanced types are being widely used due to their sustainable nature and also affordability. However, despite the origins of frugality at grassroots level, grassroots innovations continue to be fabricated in an ad hoc manner that precludes application of science and are thus susceptible to premature failure. This work advocates the use of scientific principles for developing frugal products in general with emphasis on classical and new design methodologies that are rooted in science to save resources and, hence lower costs, while aiming for robust product-functionality. This paper sheds light on the importance of the safety factor in frugal designs and the need, from here onwards, of a factor of frugality for the systematic realization of both grassroots- and advanced frugal- products. In particular, adoption of the factor of frugality, that was developed recently, has been supported in this effort with a numerical example to display the effectiveness of applying science for designing from scratch frugal products that are both streamlined and robust in their functionality.
Author Comment
This effort has been accepted for publication by the Royal Society, UK.