Teaching Sustainable Frugal Innovation Development to Business Students
Teaching Sustainable Frugal Innovation Development to Business Students

Summary/Abstract: Frugal innovations have the potential to address social, ecological, and economic issues. Students as future engineers and managers can play an important role to foster frugal innovations. Previous research related to the teaching of frugal innovation in higher education focus primarily on engineering and design study courses. There are no publications how to teach the concept of frugal innovation to future managers respectively, to students of the economic/business sciences. I introduce and evaluate a new concept for teaching sustainable frugal innovation to business students by means of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and Design Thinking. Design Thinking as a concrete innovation method supports the sustainable frugal innovation development process and LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® as a method of playful learning and creative education provides a less technological access for the business students to innovation development. I present concrete results of the innovation development of a TV for elderly and sustainability-conscious people. The social aspects of the developed TV addresses identified needs of elderly people for self-determination, social integration, and not feeling lonely. Regarding ecological aspects, the developed innovation addresses the four key circular economy principles: design, reduce, repair and maintenance, and reuse and recycle. Design Thinking is suitable to develop frugal innovations, due to the customer focus is emphasized in the empathize- and define-phase and highly relevant for the analysis of demanded core functionalities and related performance levels of frugal innovations. The here presented concept allows other researchers, lecturers, and practitioners to apply Design Thinking and LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® for sustainable frugal innovations.

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