FRUGAL INVENTION CANDIDATES AS ANTECEDENTS OF FRUGAL PATENTS - THE ROLE OF FRUGAL ATTRIBUTES ANALYSED IN THE MEDICAL ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY

Frugal innovations enable companies to access new markets because of some specific characteristics. Typically, they focus on existing solutions as a blueprint, changing parts of their functionality while reducing the costs. Many companies are faced with the question how to find ideas for such frugal innovations. For this purpose, we introduce a method for the identification of frugal invention candidates and their qualification as frugal patents. We provide a general outline of a process and apply it to the medical engineering technology. By use of semantic analysis, we shed light on the moderating role of frugal attributes to qualify a frugal invention candidate as a frugal patent. The application produces a comprehensive set of frugal patents. Our approach deepens the understanding of frugality by providing an appropriate assessment based on a newly developed frugal thesaurus. Managers will have the option to adapt our method to their particular fields of experience.