Corporate Innovation Strategies

9Foundations of Social Innovations for Consumers

A company can practice different forms of social innovation in order to create shared value for itself and for some of its various stakeholders: low-income consumers, poor populations, populations with decent incomes and so on.

9.1. Social innovations for low-income consumers

Aware that a low-income clientele exists, many companies have invested in business models capable of satisfying their needs, by creating low-cost, lower-quality products and services. Historically, the low-cost model was born in Germany, at the end of World War II, with the creation of the Aldi chain of stores. It then developed in the 1970s in the United States in the air transport sector with Southwest Airlines, then in Europe in 1995 with EasyJet, as a result of the deregulation of European airspace. This made it possible to reduce prices in order to attract customers for whom the cost of air travel was unaffordable (Ben Slimane and Di Cioccio 2013). It has spread to sectors as different as the automobile, retail banking, insurance, fitness and distribution sectors, among others (Ben Slimane and Di Cioccio 2013). This is the case with Lidl for distribution, Kiabi and Primark for textiles in Europe and Market Basket for distribution in the United States. Similarly, Free offers a low-cost service that Xavier Niel, the company’s founder, describes as a social service, since it is based on lower communication network access costs and helps contribute to ...