Welcome to the FRANCIS Project!
This Frugal innovation by Citizens for Citizens project receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101006220.
FRANCIS
FRANCIS’ consortium includes seven partners from six European countries – Fraunhofer from Germany, VTT from Finland, Finnish non-profit organization InnoFrugal, The Behavioural Insights Team from the United Kingdom, the French tech startup Agorize and two industrial enterprises, HELIOZ from Austria and Turkey’s BSH Home Appliances.
The FRANCIS project aims to develop frugal innovations by citizens for citizens within the scope of open innovation challenges.
This includes establishing a scientific foundation with recommendations on how to involve different participant groups in the challenges and how to encourage the shared development of ideas.
This project will run two open innovation challenges, each mentored by an industry partner, who supports the participants in detailing their ideas.
Challenges
Launched in February 2021, the first phase of the project in 2021 will establish a scientific foundation with recommendations on how to involve different participants groups in challenges and how to encourage the shared development of ideas. The second phase, which will take place in 2022 and 2023, will run two open innovation challenges, each mentored by an industry partner, who supports the participants in detailing their ideas.
The scope of the first challenge will be the application area of the culinary world and home care. Focused target groups are troubled families, minimalistic living people and elderly people living alone. During the second challenge round the application area solar disinfection will be focused. Target groups are minimalistic consumers, low-/middle-income households in (semi-)rural areas, people in refugee camps and micro-entrepreneurs. Target countries are Turkey, Germany, India, Egypt, Bangladesh and Uganda.
Lessons learned from the challenges will be incorporated into the citizen frugal innovation framework at the end of the project, so that they can serve as a guide for future frugal innovation initiatives.


News and Blog
Read our latest blog posts, articles, and announcements.
Call For “Student Buddies” For BSH Challenge in FRANCIS Project
Up for a challenge? Join FRANCIS as a student buddy and help us develop great solutions to improve people’s lives!
The second Citizen Science round table in the FRANCIS project
In order to generate needed input to make recommendations for the FRANCIS challenges, we conducted a second Citizen Science Round Table on the 26th of November 2021. While the first citizen science Round Table attempted to address more generalised issues considering co-working with citizens, this second Round Table highlighted more specific questions on working with citizens in frugal innovation processes.
The first Citizen Science round table in the FRANCIS project
On September 17, 2021, the first citizen roundtable as part of the FRANCIS project took place. Our aim of the project consortium was to gain more insights about motivations and barriers with which civil participants are confronted during projects with governmental, scientific institutions or industrial partners.
Contact Us
Project Coordinator
Liza Wohlfart
Fraunhofer IAO
Email: liza.wohlfart@iao.fraunhofer.de
Communication and Dissemination Manager
Venkata Gandikota
InnoFrugal
Email: venkata@innofrugal.org