Frugal engineering for the Pyramid bases: designing open products for multiple contexts.

Summary The globalization of markets, the rapid growth of emerging countries, the challenge of sustainable design of products and services, and the needs of low-income populations are all issues that are prompting companies to seek new forms of organization and innovation in response. The Base of the Pyramid (BoP) theory is part of this current context and proposes to contribute to the fight against poverty while following an economic logic. Although it is relatively recent, the literature on this theme is multiple and is now mainly in management sciences and economics. The contributions in the field of engineering are still quite limited and many questions remain unanswered about the feasibility and operationality of such an approach. The objective of this research work is to understand how the dynamics of innovation oriented Base of the Pyramid require a rethinking of current design practices, especially frugal engineering. This design process, which integrates economies of use and expenditure, is explored as a means of designing products and services in the dual context of poverty alleviation and economic profitability. Our contributions are based on two axes. The first is based on a study of 215 cases of BoP innovation reported in the literature to propose a categorization of BoP strategies. This categorization gives rise to a multi-level reading and allows us to identify important findings: the difficulty of combining social impact and economic impact in the same approach, the marked dichotomy between market strategies and inclusive strategies, as well as the existence of multiple BoP contexts that reflect a tension between satisfying needs (local impact) and the search for a change of scale (global impact). The second axis of contribution concerns frugal design, taken as a possible approach oriented Base of the Pyramid. We define frugal engineering as the search for the right balance between the proposition of an essential value and the search for a low cost. The proposal of new concepts, such as the "Non Trade Off" of the design process and the "Adaptability" of a product, leads us to question the uniqueness of this just-sufficient. The essential value is not an absolute and unique concept, but is declined in a multitude of values (re)defined by the appropriation of the product during the design, the manufacturing and the use. This appropriation involves strategies to focus on essential functionalities, so as to be able to respond to an environment that is poor in resources and infrastructure, to reduce production and assembly costs, and to meet an essential need. Frugal design is then part of an inclusive logic, where each stakeholder in the value chain contributes to redefine the just-sufficient of a frugal product according to the context. These results, from empirical fieldwork in India and Vietnam, allow us to emphasize the importance of taking into account elements of the contextual environment in the design process. We propose to represent these elements in the form of Scenes, to complete the existing user-centered tools, and to contextualize the reflection on the essential value of the product. To conclude, from these results emerge the premises of an open model of frugal design that would leave more flexibility to the Base of the Pyramid populations to appropriate the essential value of the designed product. Designing open products, adaptable to the variability of contexts, thus makes it possible to work towards a more sustainable development.