This article is part of the Building a Sustainable Business series about starting and running a sustainable business. Read all articles here.
It slices, it dices, it vacuums and cleans! And it even lets you make phone calls. But wait! That’s not all! Release 347.92 will also do your laundry and cook your dinner!
I love my iPhone almost as much as I love the son who gave it to me and even if I only use it for phone calls and email, I still marvel that such a small object can do so much.
It seems that every product is fighting to be ever more complex and do more than the competition. The message, shouted out daily is:
Plain and simple is bad. Useless, overwhelming complexity is good.
I am a product of Silicon Valley. We started our sheep’s wool insulation invention process by looking at industry leaders and trying to figure out how we could be better, faster, and sheeper than the rest. For one summer, we worked at a local factory trying to figure out how to get our insulation to slice and dice, vacuum and clean.
Meanwhile, my iPhone, weighing less than five ounces, replaces a camera, a tape recorder, a video recorder, maps, language dictionaries, a time zone calculator, a foreign exchange calculator, and a laptop for writing and email as well as a phone to call home. In other words, all the heavy equipment I lug around when I travel. But that’s not all! There are hundreds if not thousands of additional features and apps available at the touch of a finger.
On Apple’s packaging it says that the product was designed in California, home of ever-increasing complexity, and manufactured in China under strictly controlled oversight to be sure that not one feature is left out.
All this complexity can be exhausting.
Adrian Wooldridge of The Economist, wrote about a very refreshing idea called Frugal Innovation.
The article was a part of a report on emerging markets, so his examples are Asian. But, he says, “Frugal innovation is not just about redesigning products; it involves rethinking entire production processes and business models.”
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With fewer resources at their disposal than Mighty Apple, the Asian inventors take advantage of plentiful, inexpensive materials and keep their focus on what their invention is supposed to do. So instead of a $399 iPhone, for example, they would opt for a $.99 Nokia made, perhaps, from rice husks.
Another aspect of frugal innovation is distribution of work to as many contractors as possible. Instead of employing all the people and owning all the facilities, creating a virtual company not only encourages ideas from unexpected sources but it keeps overhead low. Apple makes enough of a profit that it can afford to employ its people in California and own its factories in China, but if you’re making a phone out of rice husks, spreading the work and the risk makes sense.
The ideas of frugal innovation provide a new way to think about invention. Or not — as in the case of the makers of Bon Ami, a cleanser made from feldspar and limestone. In facing competition from products made from worrisome chemicals, this 150-year-old company opted to maintain their original formula because Bon Ami was already natural and safe. They chose the high road and redesigned their packaging, not their product.
Frugal innovation is in danger of going the way of sustainability. Everyone loves it but no one agrees on its exact definition. It’s also in danger of becoming the darling of aid projects abroad and ignored at home.
In a sense, frugal innovation is about getting back to basics.
• Invent utilizing inexpensive, abundant, safe materials that are quickly replenished, repurposed, or recycled
• Use existing materials and technology in imaginative new ways
• Focus on the primary use of the invention
• Contract out as much of the work as possible
• Apply mass-production techniques in new and unexpected areas
I came across the concept of frugal innovation after our product was developed, which possibly made the impact stronger than if I had discovered it at the beginning. Every time we strayed from the basic principles we ran into problems. This makes me believe that frugal innovation is a self-sustaining process.
Like everyone else in the Valley, we started by using an already complex product as a model and tried to invent up, adding ever more complexity to make our product better. However, it wasn’t until we went back to the characteristics of our raw material and invented from there, that our product began to evolve into something simple, elegant, and very useful. Our product doesn’t slice and dice—it only does what it’s supposed to do – keeps people comfortable and safe.
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Priscilla Burgess is CEO, Co-founder, and Co-inventor of Bellwether Materials, an award-winning, triple-bottom line company that manufactures deep green building insulation made from an agricultural by-product. Before founding Bellwether Materials, she ran her own management consulting business. She has traveled all over the world, asking questions about how people work and from that, has developed several models and many opinions about the best way to grow a flourishing business.
image: Gabriele B. via Flickr cc