Antecedents of Frugal Innovation and its Relationship with Sustainability in Manufacturing Smes of Emerging Economies

Abstract

The rising disaster, climate issue and poverty across the world have become the reason of introduction of UN based Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and compelled companies to use less detrimental business practices. The situation is particularly precarious in the domain of SMEs because even multinational organizations were unable to adopt sustainable practices on a big scale. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine how design leadership and the sustainability of SMEs are related, with a focus on the mediating function of frugal innovation. Additionally, this study looked at how the link between frugal innovation and design leadership is moderated by dysfunctional competition. Convenient sampling was used to collect the quantitative survey from 340 employees of SMEs in Lahore and Faisalabad. SmartPLS 4 was used for the data analysis. According to the study's findings, sustainability and design leadership have a substantial beneficial link. Furthermore, the link between sustainability and design leadership is heavily mediated by frugal innovation. However, the link between frugal innovation and design leadership is not moderated by dysfunctional competition. Besides this, implications of this study are also given in a later section.