关键词: 朴素式创新, 制度环境, 动态能力, 高管认知, 模糊集定性比较分析

Abstract:    Frugal innovation is a kind of resource-constrained innovation paradigm for improving the living standards of low-income consumers. Frugal innovation can overcome the disadvantages of high consumption of resources and over-enrichment of functions brought by traditional innovation, and provide low-income consumers with good quality and low price. Frugal innovation has become an inevitable choice for small and medium-sized enterprises to create more value with limited resources under China′s new normal economy. What drives frugal innovation? From the existing research, many scholars bring external institutional environment into the analysis frame of frugal innovation. Other scholars have emphasized the importance of dynamic capabilities, arguing that when the external institutional environment is not sound, enterprise must enhance its internal dynamic capabilities with great flexibility in order to reduce the impact of the dynamic environment on frugal innovation and enhance the overall competitiveness of the enterprise. In addition to the external institutional environment and internal dynamic capabilities, some scholars have also proposed the role of top manager′s cognition in frugal innovation. It is believed that whether top managers understand the necessary conditions and resources of frugal innovation, whether they approve and support frugal innovation, and whether they participate in the decision-making will influence the implementation of frugal innovation. 
    Therefore, institutional environment, dynamic capabilities and top manager′s cognition have become the basic logical elements to analyze frugal innovation. Although scholars accept the fact that frugal innovation is influenced by many factors, most of scholars study the influencing factors of frugal innovation from a single level, without integrating the multi-level factors. It is difficult to explain the difference of the degree and realization path of frugal innovation among enterprises. Based on system theory and dynamic capability theory, the paper takes 16 small and medium-sized enterprises as samples, and uses Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to analyze the relationships among the different configurations of institutional environment, dynamic capabilities, top manager′s cognition and frugal innovation. The paper tries to excavate the core and auxiliary conditions of frugal innovation, and explore the driving and restriction paths of frugal innovation.  
     The results show that: firstly, opportunity recognition capability is a necessary condition for frugal innovation, and the lack of top managers′ cognition is a necessary condition for frugal innovation. Secondly, the driving mechanism of frugal innovation has three paths, including the configuration of good institutional environment and high opportunity identification capability, and the configuration of high opportunity identification capability, high integration and reconstruction capability, high organization flexibility and high top manager′s cognition, the configuration of high organizational legitimacy, high opportunity identification capability, high organizational flexibility and top manager′s cognition. Thirdly, the restriction mechanism of frugal innovation has two paths. When top managers lack cognition, it will restrict the generation of frugal innovation as long as the lack of dynamic capabilities or the lack of institutional environment. The research conclusions of this paper not only expand the research perspective of influencing factors of frugal innovation in theory, but also provide guidance for the small and medium-sized enterprises to create more value and win the advantage under numerous constraints.

Key words: frugal innovation, institutional environment, dynamic capability, top managers′ cognition, fsQCA