From 8–12 September, as part of activities linked to the ICFI Heuristics Lab, Director Prof. Peter Knorringa and Research Director Prof. Cees van Beers visited IIT Roorkee in India. They presented a seminar on Frugal Innovation in the Global South, which attracted over 100 students from various faculties at IIT Roorkee. The students strongly engaged with the thematic of frugal innovation and asked many challenging questions, leading to an intensive discussion. It also became clear already that a possible campus-wide multi-disciplinary elective course on Frugal Innovation could attract a significant number of students. In discussions later in the week also the Dean for Academic Affairs supported this idea, to be developed by our direct counterpart, Dr Bibhuti Ranjan Bhattacharjya, and supported by the Head of Dept. of Design Prof Apurbba Kumar Sharma. Staff from the Cluster at JNU, led by Prof Saradindu Bhaduri, and ICFI staff from Leiden-Delft-Erasmus look forward to contribute to such a new course. 
Another highlight was the signing of the MoU between IIT Roorkee and the International Institute of Social Studies, who host the International Centre for Frugal Innovation. Both the IIT Roorkee Director – Prof Kamal Kishore Pant – and Prof Peter Knorringa emphasized that the signing ceremony is the beginning of a new phase of more intensive collaboration on teaching, research and engagement with society. Already ongoing collaboration is with 3 Minor students from the Netherlands coming for an internship with IIT Roorkee and two joint research proposals are being developed.
We also had promising initial meetings with Azam Ali Khan, CEO of TIDES (Technology Innovation and Development of Entrepreneurship Society), the incubator embedded at IIT Roorkee. TIDES is now working with potential startups among rural women entrepreneurs, and we agreed to explore collaboration.
The main purpose of our visit was a workshop on Heuristics in Frugal Innovation, with participants from science, policy and practice. Heuristics relates to the use of intuition, experiential knowledge and ‘gut- feeling in developing innovations. ICFI and partners are developing a new research agenda on the role of heuristics in frugal innovation processes, and in the workshop we explored both the scientific agenda as well as the possible societal impacts. In the scientific agenda we explored the boundaries of heuristics – not everything that deviates from protocols can and should be identified as heuristics – and we made a beginning with the issue of how to collect rigorous data on heuristics. This is difficult as these non-formalized steps in innovation processes are often not reported or recalled. The societal impact agenda focuses on how we might support frugal innovation incubators to better assist frugal innovators once we have a better handle on how and when heuristics play a role in innovation processes. The workshop created a lot of positive energy and commitment among participants. Read more on the 3-day workshop in Part 2.