I was first introduced to the term Frugal Innovation reading Pralahad's "The Fortune at The Bottom of the Pyramid". I was reacquanted recently by a TED talk video by Ragunath Malshekar, "Breakthrough designs for ultra-low-cost products", If you can't spare the 20 minutes, this is what I learned from it:
Frugal innovation is about radical, really radical, reductions in prices that is able to deliver important things to the bottom 4 billion of people in the world who earn less than USD2 per day. I suggest architects move on from the old arguments about Form vs Function - "Less is More", blah, blah...
