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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.

In any time and space and under any circumstance, we find peasants are never passive actors in their livelihoods and rural development. Instead, they always create space for manoeuvre in order to make changes. This chapter analyses the innovative actions taken by the majority of rural inhabitants in rural areas during the overwhelming modernization process, so as to affirm that peasants are the main actors of rural development. It is they who have shaped the transformation of rural societies and the history. Through the analysis, this chapter concludes that rural development is not an objective, a blueprint nor a design. It is not the to-be-developed rear field in modernization. It is not the babysitter for cities, nor a rehearsal place for bureaucrats to testify their random thoughts. Rural development is what peasants do. The path they have chosen reveals scenery so different from modernization. If we regard development as a social change, or a cross with influential meanings, we could understand rural development as peasants’ victories over their predicament. Villages accommodate not only peasants, but without peasants villages would surely vanish. In this sense, the most important part in rural development or rural change is peasants – their conditions and their feelings.

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.

As the first decade of the 21st century drew to a close, the threats associated with economic crises, social inequalities, and human-induced environmental change focused unprecedented attention on global development trajectories. While questions about how the nature and impact of economic growth should be managed have long featured in environmentalist thought, the stark conditions created a new policy landscape of opportunity for alternative development strategies. National governments around the globe began to disseminate policy statements calling for ‘green growth’ and some, for example the United States, even developed stimulus packages aimed at restructuring economies towards a low carbon future. At the same time international non-governmental organisations such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) have developed entire initiatives focused on shaping what has come to be termed the ‘green economy’ (UNEP, 2011). Even large multinational corporations, such as Shell and their dialogues mechanism, are engaging with green economy discourses. New partnerships are emerging across governance sectors with Microsoft Corp and UNEP signing an agreement in 2009 to share knowledge collaboratively around green economy issues. In the United States, the BlueGreen Alliance is consolidating activity of labour unions and environmental organisations in order to maximise the number and quality of jobs in the green economy. With such a broad spectrum of actors and interests involved, it is unsurprising that there is no one agreed vision for a green economy. Some argue for development scenarios that promote reduced or no-growth pathways (Scott-Cato, 2009), others see the current crises creating innovation opportunities for new growth in different areas through processes of ‘creative destruction’ (Florida, 2010).

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.

The world we are living today is faced with social challenges that call for radical innovation. The rapid pace of technological developments played a key role in delivering social developments in a cautious manner that will ensure a promising future for social capital. Social innovation is a phenomenon that is put forward to urge countries to find solution to address the recurring problems of social inequalities that were not able to be eliminated by the existing rules and policies. It involves understanding the complexity of the society ecosystem and task calls for a partnership and networks between the nonprofit, public, and private sectors. This chapter explains how Malaysia utilizes public–private partnership to promote social innovations in the country. Through the 11th Malaysia Plan, Malaysia envisages to put forward the well-being and development of the people through social innovation to balance between the social and economic development. In order to fulfill this aim, Malaysia has implemented various programs and policies through the social innovation ecosystem that has been formed. The ecosystem is comprised of four initiatives, which includes microfinancing; social entrepreneurship; public service delivery; and grassroots innovation of science and technology. These initiatives will be collaboratively developed using the concept of 4P, which is the public, private, people, and professionals. Each of this initiative is discussed thoroughly in this chapter alongside with the programs and policies that have been carried out since then. Additionally, the chapter also includes the discussion on the issues and challenges that could be seen and presumed to be the hindrance to the success of the social innovation development.