How frugal innovation shape global sustainable supply chains during the pandemic crisis: lessons from the COVID-19
ISSN: 1359-8546
Article publication date: 30 August 2021
Issue publication date: 17 February 2022
Abstract
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 (e.g. face masks), ventilators and diagnostics. The failure of the industry to meet the sudden demand for these necessary items has caused a severe humanitarian crisis. These situations, resulting from the COVID-19, crisis have led to the informal growth of frugal innovation in sustainable global supply chains. This paper aims to provide a detailed overview of drivers of frugal-oriented sustainable global supply chains, following lessons acquired from emerging countries’ attempts to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors used a focused group approach to identify the drivers and this paper further validated them using existing literature published in international peer-reviewed journals and reports. The authors adopted total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) to analyze the complex relationships among identified drivers.
Findings
The authors present a theoretical framework to explain how the drivers are interlinked. This paper has developed the framework through a synthesis of the TISM modeling and Matrice d’impacts croisés multiplication appliquée á un classment analysis. This paper observed that government financial support, policies and regulations, under the mediating effect of leadership and the moderating effect of national culture and international rules and regulations, has a significant effect on the adoption of emerging technology, volunteering initiatives and values and ethics. Further, emerging technology, volunteering initiative and values and 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
The authors find that outcomes of the methodical contributions and the resulting managerial insights can be categorized into four levels. Industry and researchers alike can use the study 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.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Professor Beverly A Wagner and Dr Gary Graham, the participating government and the non-governmental organizations for their inputs during the development and preparation of the study. We also express our sincere thanks to the reviewers for their critical inputs during the review stage. In addition, the authors appreciate the support, which we have received from our project, operations and workplace management research group (POW), Liverpool Business School and the Montpellier Business School, for their research support that helped us to undertake the study.
Citation
Dubey, R., Bryde, D.J., Foropon, C., Tiwari, M. and Gunasekaran, A. (2022), "How frugal innovation shape global sustainable supply chains during the pandemic crisis: lessons from the COVID-19", Supply Chain Management, Vol. 27 No. 2, pp. 295-311. https://doi.org/10.1108/SCM-02-2021-0071
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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