Abstract:
Over the past years, a growing number of scholars have reported that Base of the Pyramid (BOP) communities engage in small, but creative activities as they are propelled by the necessity to find ways of supplementing their environmental scarcity (Ramachandran, Pant, & Pani, 2012). However, research remains rare on how creativity emerges at the BOP and whether this understanding provides the means for creative BOP business solutions (Radjou, Prabhu, & Ahuja, 2012). We focused on two cognitive concepts assumed to influence creative problem solving at the BOP: functional fixedness, i.e. the inability to generate an atypical function of an object after it has been primed with its typical function (Duncker, 1945), and resource parsimony, i.e. the frugal use of resources. To test whether the BOP context has an influence on these two concepts, we conducted an experiment in South-Africa comparing individuals from a wealthy context (i.e. 57 students from a study program of one of the most prestigious universities in Africa) with 62 individuals from a BOP context (i.e. students from a program at the same university aiming at educating individuals from townships). The box problem (German & Barrett, 2005) was used to measure functional fixedness by the time to identify the box as fixedness object and resource parsimony by counting the number of objects used to solve the task. Surprisingly, the results show that both populations do not differ with regard to functional fixedness. They do, however, with regard to resource parsimony, in that individuals from the BOP context turn out to be more parsimonious. By taking a bottom-up BOP rather than top-down corporate perspective like traditionally done in BOP research (Nakata, 2012), we offer an alternative approach to explore critical factors regarding the BOP as potential innovator. The fact that BOP individuals tend to display a more frugal mindset when it comes to deploy resources offers implication for BOP theory dealing with success factors for frugal innovation targeting the BOP (Dubiel & Ernst, 2013; Prahalad & Mashelkar, 2010) and other global markets (Immelt, Govindarajan, & Trimble, 2009).