Development and Evaluation of a Design Thinking Process Adapted to Frugal Production Systems for Emerging Markets

Frugal describes a new strategic approach which is often praised to be the key to emerging markets. More than four billion people will live in these extremely price-conscious markets in the near future. Therefore, processes for frugal products become more and more important in engineering departments of high-tech manufacturers who want to expand to emerging markets as they are struggling with local saturated markets. However, in order to meet the needs of price-sensitive customers a frugal product should be focused on core functionalities, a significant price reduction and also on an optimized performance level taking into account the expected life time and local conditions. In order to do this successfully, a new mindset for these emerging markets and, along with this, the necessity to loosen up their traditional development processes towards a more agile approach with for example the Design Thinking (DT) process is often claimed in literature. As these literature contributions are mainly based on descriptive fundaments, this paper presents an adapted process which links the basic ideas of Design Thinking and Frugal Innovation with the focus on production systems for emerging markets. The application of the process is shown by a use case.