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Why digitalising and harmonising agricultural innovation in developing economies plants the seeds for global change and doing more with less, according to Jaideep Prabhu, Professor of Marketing at Cambridge Judge Business School (CJBS)
The well-known analogy of the ‘carrot and the stick’ to drive economic and ecological change for the benefit of all may have been planted and cultivated in the developed world, but its rich crop is being harvested in emerging economies that rely heavily on agriculture and the grey or informal economy.
In fact, the notion of carrots over sticks – the greater use of incentives over punitive regulations – is ploughing fertile soil in the minds of government, private businesses and citizens in Africa and India through ‘frugal innovation’, a concept developed by Professor Jaideep Prabhu of Cambridge Judge Business School, an expert in international business, marketing, policy and development.
A recently inducted Fellow of the British Academy, Professor Prabhu has dedicated his research to ‘solving the big problems of our time such as climate change and inequality’ by looking at the democratising effect of frugal innovation especially in economies where resources are scarce and which suffer as a result of a largely disenfranchised population in the informal sector with limited or no access to energy, land and water, the key ingredients for fertility, prosperity and enterprise.
Professor Prabhu is an Academic Programme Director specialising in marketing, innovation and international business at CJBS where he leads many of the Executive Education Programmes. An upcoming programme that he is involved in developing and delivering is one for senior marketing managers around Sustainable Marketing Leadership.
He argues frugal innovation is part of the stimulus driving the optimum conditions for growth through change based upon commercial and political consent and the communication of the merits of achieving more with less.
Co-author of Digital Connections for Prosperity Accelerating Innovations: Digital Ethiopia 2025, Professor Prabhu and his team worked with the Ethiopian Prime Minister’s Digital Advisor, the Ministry of Innovation and Technology, and the country’s Ministry of Agriculture to help deliver a Frugal Innovation strategy in agriculture with backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The report discusses the process of building trust to accelerate innovation through neutral third parties – honest brokers of understanding between innovative private technology companies and governments to turbocharge development. Eight companies were selected with the support of government champions including Hello Tractor, a form of Uber app for agricultural equipment which allows farmers in need to connect with plant owners to rent tractors as and when they need them rather than trying to purchase them.
This technology provides game-changing potential for the country’s agricultural workers, with 220 million farm workers living on less than 2 dollars per day. They could now dramatically speed up their operations by accessing machinery when they require it while also boosting the profitability of the tractor owners who are better able to ‘sweat the assets’ of their machinery.
Other initiatives in Digital Ethiopia 2025 include M-Pesa, a financial services firm which enables payments and access to loans and credit for people with mobile phones but no bank accounts; Precision Development which provides access to targeted farming advice via a mobile, which is colloquially recognised as the ‘Netflix for Agriculture’; CGIAR, the world’s largest publicly funded research hub providing advice on climate resistant crops; and Digital Green, a visual means of sharing and communicating innovative best practice to risk-averse farmers.
The report also describes Simprints, a biometric fingerprint service providing access to digital identities and health services for some of the world’s poorest people, a model that was developed by Toby Norman, a Cambridge Judge PhD alumnus who was a student of Professor Prabhu.
On a larger scale, the model of digital identities through biometrics has driven the Indian government’s digital enfranchisement of more than a billion people through a unique fingerprint and biometric identity called Aadhaar. Professor Prabhu writes about this development in his 2023 book How Should a Government Be, which looks at the application of jugaad, a Hindi word for modern ‘hacks’ or frugal solutions in the context of public services. In the book, he looks at how national governments can achieve a common good through consent and communication of the benefits of, in this instance, India’s unique digital identity project that connected over one billion people and led to faster and cheaper access to a wide range of public services that were previously beyond the wider population’s reach
Such models of light-touch innovation and the ability to digitally prove exactly who you are to access your entitlements have wider applications of doing more with less. They are even being explored in polarised societies such as Peru, where the government is looking to integrate the informal economy with the formal and harmonise state payments by digitisation to improve access for all using what Professor Prabhu refers to as ‘killer applications’ of technology.
In the UK such an approach could have assisted the Government avoid the high levels of loss resulting from furlough fraud when payments were rolled out at a high speed because of the introduction of the first lockdown.
According to the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee, of the £97 billion of wage support handed out, £4.5 billion was lost to fraud or error and £5 billion was incorrectly paid to self-employed people whose income did not drop as a result of the pandemic.
The notion of public digital infrastructure facilitated by the ability to instantaneously prove our identity has wider cost and efficiency implications for other areas of life and public infrastructure, including healthcare where our ID could be linked to access to medical records, which in the UK could help heal what has become an elusive disconnect between health and social care provision.
What would appear to the naked eye to be a disconnected world can with the help of frugal innovations bring a vision of connectivity for the common good based upon technology, according to Professor Prabhu. Carrots are an agricultural staple, but they are also famous for improving eyesight and, in the world of incentives carrots can also provide a new level of foresight to the meeting of minds and a better, more connected and more sustainable planet.
