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Highly deprived urban contexts, such as informal settlements in the global south, can turn into niches of extreme innovation and sparkle ingenuity out of necessity. But what are the rationales behind the participation of disadvantaged communities in social innovations? Why do they engage in grassroots innovations? What is it that makes these grassroots try novelties and continue experimenting with them, even when the perceived benefits are not clear yet? This paper aims to examine and conceptualize the rationales for engaging in grassroots financial innovations in the context of extremely deprived urban settings.

This paper is based on the case of grassroots organizations which have started experimenting with the development of a community currency in Kisumu, Kenya. This paper is informed by in-depth interviews with members of three grassroots organizations involved in the community currency, together with observations and meeting participation since 2019.

The rationales argued by the participants for engaging in this grassroots innovation are framed in various ways: as a means for seeking poverty alleviation (the development framing); as a challenge to conventional imaginaries of innovations (the digital framing); and as an innovation embedded in community and trust relations (the community framing). These framings have a mobilizing effect that initially draws participants into the innovation. Yet, what explains persistent participation despite the decreasing influence of these framings over time is the organizational space and strategies of incompleteness accommodating these experiments.

This paper contributes to the emerging body of grassroots innovations movements literature. While research has progressed in its understandings of the challenges of scaling up innovative practices, the examination of the grassroots initiatives stemming from extremely deprived settings, and the rationales and framings behind, have been under examined. This paper comes to bridge this gap.

Grassroots innovations, developed by local people using locally available resources, have shown the potential to provide low-cost technological solutions to the problems faced by underserved consumers in the global south. This paper aims to link the concept of grassroots innovations to energy use in the context of India.

The paper takes three case studies from the list of technologies scouted and nurtured by the National Innovation Foundation to critically discuss the potential of grassroots innovations for the dissemination and diffusion of urban sustainable energy uses. The data for this study has been collected from various secondary sources. It discusses the opportunities and challenges in promoting grassroots innovations for sustainable energy uses in urban settings.

The paper discusses the opportunities and challenges in promoting grassroots innovations for sustainable energy uses in urban settings.

Although the concept and understanding of grassroots innovations have well developed, its linkages with sustainable energy use in urban settings have received scarce or no attention in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the commercialisation mechanisms of the innovations that emerge from the informal sector of Indian economy. Also known as grassroots innovations, they are said to better fit with the local market demands and conditions in the developing nations of the world. The paper discusses the grassroots innovation ecosystem in India and the role that is played by the state in providing institutional support.

The paper is based on an exploratory study using both the primary and secondary sources of data. Primary data are taken from the interview of the innovators during the field work, whereas secondary data are acquired from research articles published in various journals indexed in Scopus and web of sciences, government publications and reports. The annual reports of National Innovation Foundation are analysed to gather information and to build the arguments for this paper. The secondary data are also collected and evaluated from the database of the grassroots innovators available on Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network.

The paper provides insight into how the grassroots innovations are commercialised in India through different pathways such as social entrepreneurship, technology transfer and open source technology. It takes four case studies to discuss the institutional support to the grassroots innovator and the challenges in the diffusion of the grassroots innovations.

Due to the chosen research approach, the results cannot be generalised on all grassroots innovations. Researchers are encouraged to conduct a survey of more grassroots innovations in order to derive generalised outputs.

The paper includes implications for understanding the diffusion process of grassroots innovations that can be useful for all the emerging and developing nations.

The paper fulfils an identified need to study the diffusion modes of informal sector innovations and management of grassroots innovations.

Disadvantaged regions in India suffer from various forms of problems aggravated by constraints of accessibility. This paper aims to conceptualize innovations as solutions to the problem at grassroots.

This paper tries to bridge empirical gaps in conceptualization of innovations at grassroots with the application of both empirical and theoretical methods.

Grassroots innovation is an important instrument to solve such problems in these regions, where appropriate solution is not developed by the government instrument or private agencies (market) in general with various forms of value creation.

This paper tries to bridge empirical gaps in conceptualization of innovations at grassroots.

The purpose of this study is to examine the dimensions of inclusive and grassroots innovations operationalised by a social enterprise and the impact of these activities on urban regeneration. To this end, the case of Homebaked in Liverpool, UK, is presented and discussed.

Face-to-face interviews with members of Homebaked’s management, staff and volunteers were conducted; the interviews were complemented with on-site observations and review of archival information of the social enterprise.

The data gathered revealed the organisation’s involvement in both types of innovation as a means to achieve long-term urban regeneration related goals. For instance, innovative, strategic and human dimensions, together with the human dimension emerged as key ways of innovating. The impacts of innovative practices comprised encouraging inclusiveness among residents and non-residents, with approaches including hands-on training workshops, job and volunteering opportunities being predominant.

First, the study advances the theoretical and applied understanding of grassroots and inclusive innovation in the context of a social enterprise. For instance, an innovative/strategic and human dimension emerged as predominant ways in which grassroots and inclusive innovation elements were manifested. These dimensions were based on technology uptake, implementation of new product/service concepts or harnessing the skills of local and non-local individuals. Similarly, four dimensions associated with the impacts of these types of innovation were revealed. Second, the study addresses acknowledged gaps in the literature, particularly regarding the limited contributions illuminating processes and determinants of innovation among social enterprises.

This paper aims to contribute to the emerging entrepreneurship research that deals with resilience by examining how embeddedness in place and in trans-local grassroots networks influences proactive entrepreneurship for local resilience.

Three theoretical propositions are developed on the basis of the existing literature. These propositions are assisted with brief empirical illustrations of grassroots innovations from the context of agri-food systems.

Embeddedness in place and in trans-local grassroots networks enables proactive entrepreneurship for local resilience. Social-cultural embeddedness in place facilitates access to local resources and legitimacy, and creation of social value in the community. Ecological embeddedness in place facilitates spotting and leveraging of environmental feedbacks and creation of ecological value. Embeddedness in trans-local grassroots networks provides entrepreneurs with unique resources, including globally transferable knowledge about sustainability challenges and practical solutions to these challenges. As result, entrepreneurship for resilience is explained as an embedding process. Embedding means attuning of practices to local places, as well as making global resources, including knowledge obtained in grassroots networks, work in local settings.

Researchers should continue developing the emerging domain of entrepreneurship for resilience.

The objective of resilience and due respect to local environment may entail a need to consider appropriate resourcing practices and organisational models.

The critical roles of place-based practices for resilience deserve more recognition in today’s globalised world.

The specific importance of the ecological dimension of embeddedness in place is emphasised. Moreover, by combining entrepreneurship and grassroots innovation literatures, which have talked past each other to date, this paper shows how local and global resources are leveraged throughout the embedding process. Thereby, it opens unexplored research avenues within the emerging domain of entrepreneurship for resilience.

The purpose of this paper is to stir the deliberation on understanding grassroots innovation (GI) phenomenon through the lived experience approach and attempt to address the existing void in current literature.

This paper outlines a human science research approach for studying the subjective reality embedded in the GI phenomenon. Such an approach provides a better and more bottom-up understanding of the underlying individual and interpersonal dynamics shaping the GI.

This study provides a richer understanding of the underlying individual and interpersonal dynamics shaping the GI phenomena. This may serve as an aid for future research on scaling, managing GI and developing entrepreneurial capabilities of the grassroots innovators (GIrs). The study also confirms that no single unilateral theory can fully explain the lived experiences of the GIrs at the ideation, opportunity recognition, prototyping and scaling stage of GI. Rather, it is quintessential to have an integrated holistic perspective for understanding GI. This study also highlights the importance of hermeneutic phenomenology in pro-poor innovation research and practice in the near future.

This paper’s main limitation is whether the findings can be generalized in a wider context. The authors acknowledge this limitation. However, the purpose of this study is not to generalize the findings but rather provide a contextual understanding of what constitutes the lived experiences of GI. The authors recommend that a future study covering greater number of GIrs across India be undertaken to gain a better appreciation of the bigger picture.

Systematic approaches for tapping into GI are conspicuously non-existent and hence a contextual understanding through the proposed holistic lens will assist in thriving of the GI phenomena in South Asian countries such as India.

Whereas a lot of emphasis has been placed on the open innovations (Chesbrough, 2003, von Hippel, 2005) and their implications in the formal sector, this paper purports to fill the literature gap in identifying the process of dialogue between the formal and the informal sector with reference to the open innovations, emanating at the grassroots’ level, for effecting inclusive and a sustainable development. This causality is being sought to be achieved through initiation, accessibility, building-the-bridges and finding unique solutions to the problems through mutual dialogue and reciprocity. Thus, this interplay of interaction shall facilitate the shaping up of sustainable and inclusive development through the open innovations. It may be pertinent to note here that the present paper shall specifically limit its scope to the conceptualization for such a dialogue to eventually happen in due course of time.

Theoretical build-up.

For harnessing the potential of the innovations at the grassroots, it is important that bridges be built between the informal and the formal spaces.

Hitherto, the notion of inclusive and sustainable development was not studied in the research with respect to the open innovations at the grassroots (informal sector). The paper is attempt at filling this gap.

The paper aims to address two key gaps in the literature of frugal innovation. First, it disambiguates frugal innovations into its types, and into the various levels at which it happens. Second, it builds upon the theoretical foundations of resource-based view, new institutional economics, economics of location, and institutional theory to offer testable propositions on determinants of frugal innovations.

This is a conceptual paper. The authors first systematically reviewed the extant literature on frugal innovation and related domains and categorized the existing understanding on the domain into various typologies of frugal innovation. The authors then justified why certain key theoretical lenses are tenable to understand the determinants of frugal innovation and then examined the conditions that enable such innovations.

The paper has three key findings. First, frugal innovation comprises of a frugal mindset, a frugal process and a frugal outcome, which may be practiced distinctly. Second, frugal innovators are of three types: grassroots-level, domestic-enterprise level, and MNC-subsidiary level. Each has their distinctive incentives and styles of frugal innovation. Third, a frugal mindset is encouraged by a resource-scarce environments, weaker institutional intermediaries, and a higher tolerance for uncertainty. Frugal processes are espoused by poor property rights regime and a critical size of lead market; and frugal outcomes are influenced by the network-position of innovators, and the presence of critical lead-markets.

The propositions are though testable, but proxies need to be developed to measure the variables, such as a frugal mindset, and a frugal process. Further, the current view on various types and levels of frugal innovation is that of mutual exclusivity, whereas this may not always be the case. Hence, it might be useful to identify contingencies in which these distinctions fade away.

The paper is valuable in two key aspects. First, it offers a much-needed theoretical underpinning to the phenomenon of frugal innovation, such that the phenomenon could be better understood and influenced. Second, it nuances the phenomenon by identifying distinct types of frugal innovators in terms of their motivation, institutional influences, and styles of innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a critical analysis of the innovation discourse, arguing that a more contextualised understanding of the challenges of innovation for development and poverty reduction in low-income economies will help the authors’ to unravel new development opportunities and provide alternatives to conventional capitalist paths to innovation.

The authors offer an integrative review of the literature addressing the topic of innovation emerging from within developing countries. Because existing innovation models are generally presented in ways that reflect practices and thought patterns inherent to the industrialised world, a literature review that offers an initial conceptualisation and synthesis of the literature to date on the theme of innovation from within developing countries provides for a more valuable contribution than a reconceptualization of existing models.

The paper highlights different narratives of innovation, how they emerge and what are their implications. The authors outline a research agenda for generating new knowledge about innovation capabilities in what is generally known as the developing world.

This paper shows that the recent evolution of the discourse of development is increasingly intertwined with elements that originated in other discursive worlds. The last three decades of innovation research have been characterised by a “cross-pollination” between different disciplines: development studies, science and technology studies, business management and organisation studies. By reviewing major research works conducted by scholars in these disciplines, this paper weds literature that heretofore have remained largely isolated from each other. The key innovation narratives that the study unveils – e.g. inclusive growth, bottom of the pyramid, grassroots innovation – address major questions of concern to these academic scholars around the political and socio-technical aspects that influence a firm’s capacity to innovate in the context of developing countries.