Shaping Frugal Innovation Processes, and Ensuring Security and Sustainable Development of Enterprises in the Environment

This article discusses the importance of 28 different activities—aimed at shaping innovative processes, e.g., connected with costs and efficiency, employment, production waste, cooperation with external entities, innovation policy and regulations, social acceptance, as well as value management—in ensuring the security and sustainable development of enterprises in the environment. The objective of the study is to estimate the level of the importance of specific factors/activities related to shaping the frugal innovation processes in ensuring the security and sustainable development of enterprises, as well as the identification of the main groups of these factors/activities, and the comparison of enterprises in terms of the importance of these factors/activities in ensuring security and sustainable development. The study used both an inductive and a deductive approach. It used the cluster analysis (k-mean method), the analysis of descriptive statistics, and the following statistical tests: Kolmogorov–Smirnov test for one sample, Kruskal–Wallis test for independent samples, and U Mann–Whitney test for independent samples. In the study, four basic components were identified, which were used for subsequent quantitative verification of six research hypotheses. The study included 200 large enterprises from the most innovative sectors in Poland. The study showed that factors/activities related to the implementation of frugal innovation processes are of moderately high importance in ensuring the security and sustainable development of enterprises in the environment, as well as innovative enterprises that are dominated by entities characterized by the high importance of all factors/activities related to the implementation of frugal innovation processes in ensuring their safety and sustainable development in the environment. Furthermore, there are no statistically significant differences between enterprises in the importance of factors/activities related to the implementation of frugal innovation processes in ensuring the security and sustainability of these enterprises in the environment in the case of entities with different: lengths of service (i.e., the age of the enterprise), scale of operation, average annual turnovers, as well as profile of operation (i.e., the sector).