Agile and Frugal Strategies for the Handling of Increased Uncertainty

Abstract

Increased uncertainty and customer needs that change radically within a few days lead to socio-economic changes. Conventional management concepts no longer work in a business paradigm that calls for quick reactions and continuous business model innovations. Keeping the existing business running as efficiently as possible and at the same time exploring new opportunities for the future requires agility, flexibility, and openness. Organizational resilience helps to reposition over a crisis. For those who are open to novel approaches, the concept of frugal innovation creates new opportunities: targeted and cost-efficient satisfaction of client expectation, reduced to what the user needs at the moment. This article explains inter-organizational agility as the basis for frugal solutions. We suggest a value-adding strategy with fewer resources as the first step towards responsible corporate management.

Keywords: Agility, inter-organizational agility, frugal innovation, open innovation, disruption, Covid-19, ecosystems

JEL Classification: M,