How frugal innovation shape global sustainable supply chains during the pandemic crisis: Lessons from the COVID-19

Purpose- The COVID‐19 crisis has created enormous strain in global supply chains. The disruption has caused severe shortages of critical items, including Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) (e.g. face masks), ventilators, and diagnostics. The failure of industry to meet the sudden demand for these necessary items has caused a severe humanitarian crisis. These situations, resulting from the COVID19, crisis have led to the informal growth of frugal innovation in sustainable global supply chains. In this paper we provide a detailed overview of drivers of frugal-oriented sustainable global supply chains, following lessons acquired from emerging countries' attempt to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Design/Methodology/Approach- We utilized a focused group approach to identify the drivers and we further validated them using existing literature published in international peer-reviewed journals and reports. We adopted total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) to analyze the complex relationships among identified drivers. Findings- We present a theoretical framework to explain how the drivers are interlinked. We have developed our framework through a synthesis of the TISM modeling and MICMAC analysis. We observed that government financial support, policies & regulations, under the mediating effect of leadership and the moderating effect of national culture and international rules & regulations, has a significant effect on the adoption of emerging technology, volunteering initiatives, and values & ethics. Further, emerging technology, volunteering initiative, and values & ethics have a significant effect on supply chain talent and frugal engineering. These results provide some useful theoretical insights that may help in further investigating the role of frugal innovations in other contexts. Originality/ value- We find that outcomes of the methodical contributions and the resulting managerial insights can be categorized into four levels. Industry and researchers alike can use our study in order to develop the decision-support systems guiding frugal-oriented sustainable global supply chains amid the COVID-19 pandemic and in recovering them thereafter. Suggestions for future research directions are offered and discussed