Driving Citizen Frugal Innovation: Leveraging Insights of the FRANCIS Project to Improve the Engagement of Marginalized Groups in Innovation Challenges

This paper presents interim findings of the EU-funded project FRANCIS that aims at supporting marginalized citizens in the development of frugal innovations through open innovation challenges. The project runs two challenges on different topics, tar-get groups and focus countries. The first one was completed last year; the next one is about to start. Lessons learned from the first challenge include the necessity a) to empower local outreach partners, b) to keep the regional teams small and dedi-cated, c) to separate the language groups, and d) to tailor the support for the needs of different groups of society.