I recently read an article on LinkedIn on the topic of frugal innovation and potential solutions to the COVID-19 crisis. The concept is simple, drawing on collaboration within local and business communities to overcome crisis with four underlying principles: reuse, repurpose, recombine and rapidity.
1.Reuse
Find available but outdated resources and use them in new ways without requiring much alteration.
2. Repurpose Alter a currently valuable resource to serve a different purpose, such as repurposing bin bags into clinical gowns and ski goggles into safety glasses.
3. Recombine Mix resources, processes and practices among non-profit organizations, governments, and for-profit businesses across different industries (such as adapting commercial space into medical centres or manufacturing spaces for PPE production facilities).
4. Rapidity Rather than slowly developing solutions from scratch, speed must be of the essence. Reusing, repurposing, and recombining existing resources offer a faster route to fixes. But each of these frugal innovation techniques must also be executed speedily.
The collaborative nature of frugal innovation uses simple but proven measures to tackle crisis and adapt using communities, infrastructure and relevant resources that are already in place. It holds an insightful key to navigating change on any scale with a focus on collaboration for positive change and reusing resources for minimum environmental impact.
How could you or your business benefit from adopting a frugal innovation framework to improve your output and reduce your environmental impact? What would you need to change to make that happen?
At Proactive by Design, we believe that innovation is the key to successfully navigating through change.