Frugal Innovation vs. Social Innovation: Has cheap as the new chic taken over the social innovation realm?

Numbers, Statistics, Figures, EBIT, ROI. Lean Management, Six-Sigma, Supply Chains, Logistics Interfaces. Micro-Finance, Micro-Insurance, Re-Engineering. Western Culture is obsessively doing more with less.One of our favorite ways to do more with less is through acronyms (who wants to spell out Return on Investment? It takes up SO MUCH SPACE!) Even our texting patterns tell the story. OMG, lmao, oic, brb, LOL, and the list goes on... However, doing more with less is commonly linked with creating a buzz word to describe the action. Isn't Synergy really just working together to accomplish more than we could on our own? It seems the Social Innovation sphere is in dire danger of being edged out by the new kid on the block: Frugal Innovation. The Economic Times describes Frugal Innovation as, "a whole new management philosophy, which integrates specific needs of the bottom of the pyramid markets as a starting point and works backwards to develop appropriate solutions which may be significantly different from existing solutions designed to address needs of upmarket segments."(http://www.peerpower.com/et/1269/Frugal-innovations-for-financial-inclusion) Personally, I interpret FI as removing unnecessary parts or finding cheaper alternatives until you slash the price of an existing product or service to a predetermined level. I talked about this a bit last week when discussing how Nigel Waller created the Cloud Phone when he failed to create a $5 cell. Would Waller's quest to create a $5 cell not qualify as Frugal Innovation if he first did not determine the baseline needs of the population but instead cut away from existing upmarket cellphones? This brings up the question, are all of these buzz words really accomplishing anything? After all, if an under served population can now utilize a product or service hasn't social innovation been accomplished? Does it matter whether it came from a utilization of existing private-sector supply chains or through eliminating expensive superfluous frills that were unnecessary for the needs of the population? I would argue in fact that Frugal Innovation is just another tool to accomplish Social Innovation. However, it has also now become a chief means of accomplishing SI. It is being utilized greatly in India in products from personal computers to affordable housing. I would be interested to hear from people who identify as Social Innovators / Entrepreneurs as well as Frugal Innovators / Entrepreneurs to see how their interpretation of the concepts may differ. The bottom line is, whatever buzz word you decide to use, everyday Frugal and Social Innovation are being employed to improve the lives of under served populations, and that's a good thing.