About Nesta

Nesta is a research and innovation foundation. We apply our deep expertise in applied methods to design, test and scale solutions to some of the biggest challenges of our time, working across the innovation lifecycle.

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Frugal innovations

Frugal innovation responds to limitations in resources, whether financial, material or institutional, and using a range of methods, turns these constraints into an advantage.

In Innovation policy

Through minimising the use of resources in development, production and delivery, or by leveraging them in new ways, frugal innovation results in dramatically lower-cost products and services. Successful frugal innovations are not only low cost, but outperform the alternative, and can be made available at large scale. Often, but not always, frugal innovations have an explicitly social mission.

Examples of frugal innovation are found throughout the Indian innovation system: from Dr Devi Shetty's path-breaking model of delivering affordable heart surgery at Narayana Hrundayalaya, to efforts to crowdsource drug discovery driven by government labs, to Bharti Airtel's approach to cutting the cost of mobile phone calls. Here we briefly profile just a few of the examples covered in the Our Frugal Future report.

We extend our impact through two specialised units that help people and organisations to solve complex problems and achieve their goals.

BIT

BIT helps clients from government, nonprofits and the private sector to improve people’s lives through our empirical problem solving and deep understanding of human behaviour.

Challenge Works

Challenge Works designs and runs challenge prizes to spark innovation in science, technology and society.

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Frugal innovations

About Nesta

Frugal innovations

GE ECG Machine

Tata Nano

Aakash

1298 Ambulances

Aravind Eye Hospitals

Tata Swach

Narayana Hrudayalaya

Bharti Airtel

SELCO

Jaipur prosthetics

A powerful ecosystem for innovation

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