Can frugal go global? Diffusion patterns of frugal innovations

The diffusion of frugal innovation has been an uncharted territory so far. The purpose of this study is to shed light on this topic and to explore the different diffusion patterns. While practitioners have shown growing interest in scaling up frugal innovations, the extant academic literature on the diffusion topic is scarce. In this article, we identify four main diffusion patterns of frugal innovations. We label these diffusion patterns as local diffusion, proximity diffusion, distance diffusion, and global diffusion. Both proximity diffusion and distance diffusion take place predominantly in the countries where the socio-economic context is quite similar. In rare cases, frugal innovation can diffuse globally and find its ways into developed markets.