Frugal Innovation in Medicine

This is a very interesitng website that aims at sharing ideas, realizations of frugal innovations in medicine and ultimately facilitate their dissemination and use worldwide. Indeed, one of the main issue is that many frugal innovations remain local and rarely spread to others who might face similar challenges. Frugal innovations in medicine, is of partuivlar interest for low & middle Income countries.

What is Frugal innovation? Frugal innovation provides effective functional solutions to common problems encountered by “the many”, with a minimal use of resources. In healthcare, these innovations frequently arise when usual solutions are too expensive or not available, and are especially helpful in and for developing countries.

Four types of frugal innovations can be identified:

- Lean tools and techniques refer to the simplification and adaptation of existing technologies to drastically reduce costs and provide health innovations to everyone.

 Opportunistic solutions refer to the clever use of modern, cheap, and available-for-everyone technologies to tackle “old problems”.

 Contextualized adaptations refer to the diversion of existing techniques, materials or tools for completely different purposes.

 Bottom-up innovations refer to original, simple – and even simplistic- ideas to obtain results unattainable before.

Check the website here