Halfway through Monday's VOICE session, a participant asked Maria Alejandra Pineda Escobar a question she hadn't thought much about before, but found immediately intriguing and relevant. She'd just explained the framework participants would use to identify and analyse frugal innovation, and given the group its task for the week: pick one example, run it through the framework, and bring it back on Wednesday to compare notes. The question that followed cut straight to something underneath the framework itself. When filling it in, whose perspective were you supposed to use? The innovator's? The user's? The expert's?
Different perspectives, Pineda Escobar said, might produce completely different answers. A product could tick every box from a producer's point of view while failing entirely from the user's. Rather than settle the question on the spot, she opened it up. Everyone could choose their own lens for the homework, and Wednesday would be the place to compare what changed depending on which one they'd picked.
Two days later, that's exactly what happened, and the answer turned out to matter more than anyone in the room had expected.
What the Room Already Knew
Pineda Escobar, full professor at Politécnico Gran Colombiano and leader of Frugalis, ICFI's hub in Colombia, opened Monday's session with a quick icebreaker. She asked participants to drop examples of frugal innovation into a shared word cloud, just to see what surfaced before any framework came into play.
The answers came in fast. M-Pesa appeared far larger than anything else on the screen, alongside a wind-up radio, bicycle parts repurposed for farming, the Jaipur Foot prosthetic, the Tata Nano, and Delft Imaging's CAD4TB, an AI tool that reads X-rays for tuberculosis offline, in places without reliable internet or a radiologist nearby.
One participant explained why M-Pesa counted, in her view: it gave people access to mobile payments without needing a bank card or conventional banking infrastructure. Another described CAD4TB as one of the clearest examples she knew of frugal innovation in practice, thanks to its simple design and fast offline operation.
What struck Pineda Escobar wasn't the variety so much as the language people used to explain their choices. Almost nobody reached for the cheapest possible price as the defining feature. People kept talking about access and simplicity instead, about what these innovations had made possible that conventional solutions hadn't.
Frugal, Compared to What?
That observation became the spine of her argument. Frugal innovation, she said, can't be judged in isolation. It only makes sense relative to whatever already exists in a given context. A solar home system isn't frugal because it's cheap in some absolute sense. It may be frugal because it gives access to electricity in a simpler, more optimal way than the alternative available to the people using it. An offline diagnostic tool isn't frugal just because of its price tag. It may be frugal because the alternative was no diagnosis at all, or a long and difficult journey to find one.
The benchmark itself, though, isn't always obvious. Is it the mainstream global product? The cheaper local alternative? The informal workaround people already rely on? Or the absence of anything at all?
This is also why Pineda Escobar resists settling on one universal definition of frugal innovation, a question a participant put to her directly. Chasing universality, she said, risks flattening exactly the cultural and contextual nuance that makes something frugal in a given place to begin with.
She offered a case from her own PhD research to make the point concrete. A social enterprise had successfully brought affordable solar energy to an underserved community, then tried the same approach with dry toilets, for a community accustomed to open defecation. The toilets were well-designed, low-cost and technically sound. The community didn't want them. The problem wasn't engineering. It came down to how that community understood the world, what they believed about the body, and customs passed down over generations, none of which any amount of clever, cheap design could simply override.
An innovation can satisfy every item on a frugality checklist and still fail completely, she argued, because the checklist never stopped to ask whether the people it was meant for actually wanted the thing in the first place.
Frugal Does Not Mean Sustainable
The week's sessions also pushed participants to think about welfare and sustainability, not just affordability.
One participant took the conversation on affordability somewhere unexpected, looking at revenue rather than only cost. What if a frugal innovation looks costly upfront, but ends up generating better income, or freeing up time that can be used elsewhere? The question of resource use came up too. How do you account for what happens at the end of a material's life? Does sustainability have a place inside the idea of frugal innovation, or is it a separate question entirely?
Pineda Escobar was clear about the need to differentiate frugality from sustainability. Designing something frugally doesn't automatically make it sustainable. Aiming for frugal doesn't guarantee inclusive, and it doesn't guarantee sustainable either. That's exactly why the kinds of questions participants kept raising throughout the course matter: they're key to understanding the developmental implications a frugal innovation can have.
When the Framework Came Back
Wednesday opened with three breakout groups, where participants had applied the framework to their own examples over the two days in between. When the groups reported back, the discussion didn't produce a neat list of conclusions. It produced better problems.
One group had looked at M-Pesa and the Tata Nano. M-Pesa's simplicity stood out, an interface that could work for people without formal banking access. But the group also raised something less flattering: in its early years, M-Pesa had real safety problems. Money sometimes went to the wrong person, and the platform became a playground for scammers before security caught up with the system. The same group then turned to the Tata Nano, and found a similar story underneath its international reputation. Marketed worldwide as the world's cheapest car, it turned out, once benchmarked against vehicles already sold locally in India, to be no cheaper than several alternatives already on the road. The label had been earned more through branding than through the actual numbers. The car was also eventually pulled from the market after failing safety tests and facing reported cases of spontaneous combustion. A frugal innovation, one participant concluded, isn't fixed the moment it launches. Its shortcomings, and the fixes that follow, are part of how it develops.
The benchmark question turned sharper, not easier, in a second group's discussion, where a story from earlier in the week, about an Indian innovator who'd built affordable sanitary pads after discovering his own wife couldn't afford the ones already on the market, came back up alongside a string of other products: solar lanterns moving up to solar-powered water pumps, and the everyday economics of chai in India. If a community has no electricity at all, and no sanitary products at all, what exactly do you measure the alternative against? The existing product, or the actual practice women already use as their own solution? One participant described how her thinking landed on combining the two, treating both the product and the existing practice as the local benchmark for analysing how frugal something really is. Another participant pushed the sanitary pad case further still. If even the innovator himself had only discovered the real need by asking his own wife directly, he suggested, maybe the fairest benchmark for affordability shouldn't be another product on a shelf somewhere, but something more concrete: what people in that specific area actually earn, on average. Not an exact figure, he admitted, more of an estimate, but still something solid enough to measure affordability against, no matter whose perspective you started from.
A platform built for farmers in Ghana raised a different kind of gap, one the third group had run into directly. It offered market prices and weather forecasts by text message, and scored well on affordability since it ran entirely on phones farmers already owned. But it only ever worked in one direction. Farmers received information. They had no way to send anything back, no way to flag that a quoted market price didn't match what they were actually being offered that day. One participant in this group had run into an almost identical wall building a camera-based system to detect human-wildlife conflict for a university project: no matter how many times the design was revised, it stayed too expensive for individual farmers, until the team redirected the whole project toward the local forest department instead, with farmers still benefiting, just indirectly.
Designing For, or Along With?
When Pineda Escobar finally offered her own answer to the benchmark question, it doubled back to where the week had started.
Forget the idea of comparing a new product to some rival sitting on a shelf, she said. The real benchmark is what people are already doing right now to cope without it. If there's no electricity, look at how people light their homes today. If there's no sanitary product, look at what women are actually using instead. And if a product already exists but is only partially used, because people are managing in different ways, look at all of those alternatives together.
That's the baseline. But finding it isn't something you can do from a distance. It only works if someone has actually gone and asked the people involved what their day to day looks like. Are we designing for people, Pineda Escobar asked the group, or are we designing alongside them?
This week, VOICE was hosted by Colombia. This piece covers the sessions led by Maria Alejandra Pineda Escobar (Politécnico Gran Colombiano, Frugalis). A companion article covers Mario Manzi-Puertas's session that same week. VOICE is an eight-week international online programme on frugal and bottom-up innovation, bringing together participants from the Netherlands, India, Kenya and Colombia. Sessions take place every Monday and Wednesday from 14:00 to 16:30 CEST.