Healthcare frugal innovation: A solving problem rationale under scarcity conditions

Healthcare innovation comprises an interactive and uneven process where different agents follow diverse rationales. Recent literature has stressed the role of hospitals as complex organizations that link health necessities and innovative solutions. Alternative innovation rationales to the mainstream innovation approach facilitate the creation of high quality solutions while promoting universal access to healthcare. Based on a case study in a public hospital located in a developing country, we show that frugal innovations, defined as a novel and satisfactory solution under resource scarcity conditions, are an adequate innovation approach for organizations operating under both severe resource restrictions and universal access to healthcare mandates. A frugal approach to innovation allows the hospital studied in this article to solve particular healthcare necessities in a specific domain. However, these processes of frugal innovation took place dissociated from the market and the public policy. Therefore, they remain circumscribed to the application context in which they emerged.