He could not tell his wife why he wanted to know more about her period. She would not talk about it. Neither would his mother. Neither would anyone, really, because in his part of India, this simply was not something you discussed.
So Arunachalam Muruganantham, a welder with no formal education, asked anyway. When his wife told him she could not afford sanitary pads on the family budget, he bought her a pack, took it apart, and discovered the raw material inside cost only a fraction of what he'd paid for it. He decided he could build something better, and cheaper, himself.
What followed cost him almost everything. He tested early prototypes on his own body, rigging a bladder of goat blood to his hip to simulate menstruation while he rode his bicycle around the village. His wife left him. His mother left too. The village thought he'd lost his mind. He kept going anyway, eventually reverse-engineering the machine that fluffs cellulose into something absorbent, the same kind of machine that would later earn him a national innovation award and the nickname India's Padman.
Mario Manzi-Puertas, Associate Professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia and co-founder of the Latin American Frugal Innovation Network, showed the group this story midway through Monday's VOICE session and asked a simple question: what made this man capable of doing what he did?
He hadn't started with a cheaper product in mind, Manzi-Puertas pointed out. He'd started with a why. Why were sanitary pads already on sale in India, and still not reaching the women who needed them?
The Person Behind the Product
Manzi-Puertas's own interest in the topic started, he said, with a television character: MacGyver. The man who could solve almost any problem with a paperclip, a stick of gum, and whatever happened to be lying around. What stayed with him wasn't the gadgetry. It was the underlying skill, the ability to solve a real problem using only what was already at hand.
He calls that skill resourcefulness, and has spent years of research trying to understand how it actually works. He looks at three different ways people behave when resources are scarce. Some people get creative with materials, finding new uses for whatever happens to be lying around. Others get creative with money, stretching it through delayed payments, borrowed capital, or other means that don't involve outside funding. And some get creative in the moment, coming up with quick fixes under pressure when there's no time to plan.
Of the three, his research found the first one, working creatively with whatever materials are at hand (he calls it bricolage), to be by far the strongest link to actual innovation. Knowing how to stretch money, what he terms financial bootstrapping, helped people figure out what resources they had to work with in the first place. Quick improvisation under pressure, somewhat surprisingly, barely mattered at all. The headline finding, in his words: innovation depends less on how many resources someone has, and more on their capacity to reframe scarcity itself, to see a constraint as something workable rather than something blocking the way.
That's what made Padman useful as an example. He had no formal education, no money, no machinery, and no social permission to even investigate the problem he was trying to solve. What he had was curiosity, persistence, and the ability to look at what was lying around and see what else it could become.
Not a One-Man Show
After the video, Manzi-Puertas asked the group what they'd noticed. The chat filled quickly: curiosity, empathy, resilience, the willingness to keep going when everyone around him said he'd lost his mind.
One participant pushed the list further and brought in collaboration. Coming from a background in participatory design, she said the story also risked reinforcing an image she found frustrating: the lone genius entrepreneur, solving everything by force of personal will. In her experience, the strongest innovations in development work rarely came from someone acting alone. They came from people who worked well with others and pulled resources from a wider network.
Manzi-Puertas agreed. Human resources, he said, sit at the top of his own list. Other people are so often the ones who end up supplying whatever is missing: a connection that leads to funding, a piece of expertise nobody on the team had, sometimes just someone willing to say yes when no one else would. Pineda Escobar made a similar point: frugal innovation shouldn't be reduced to the image of a lone hero. It's a matter of multiple actors, of collaboration, of listening to the people who are part of both the problem and the solution.
A Network, Briefly
Later in the week, Manzi-Puertas introduced the Latin American Frugal Innovation Network, the organisation he co-founded in 2018 and that connects researchers, universities and practitioners working on frugal innovation across the region. It's one of several hubs and partner networks that make up the wider ICFI community, an overview of which is gradually taking shape on the ICFI website.
This week, VOICE was hosted by Colombia. This piece covers the session led by Mario Manzi-Puertas (Red Latinoamericana de Innovación Frugal). A companion article covers Maria Alejandra Pineda Escobar's sessions on the 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.