Grassroots Innovation Movements

Grassroots innovation involves movements and networks of academics, activists and practitioners who seek to experiment with alternative forms of knowledge creation and processes for innovation. These alternatives harness local ingenuity directed towards local development. Emerging economies such as India and in South America are currently and historically the sites for notable and internationally visible, though understudied, attempts at alternative innovation. Meanwhile, the UK and Europe conjure a post-industrial, wealthy nation setting, and offers a contrasting location where activist groups and communities are similarly mobilizing around issues such as community energy, other sustainability issues, and around maker/hacker-spaces, reclaiming high-technologies for commons-based peer-production in open community workshops. These movements have arisen in response to different dynamics, including negative consequences of mainstream growth patterns (e.g. unsustainable production and consumption patterns).

This book presents and critically analyses six diverse grassroots innovation movements in India, South America and Europe, situating them in their particular dynamic historical contexts, and explaining the emergence of movement framings or perspectives on innovation and development.

The historic movements studied include the movement for socially useful production (UK), the appropriate technology movement (South America), and the People’s Science Movement (India), the latter still active currently. The other contemporary movements studied are community workshops for grassroots digital fabrication (Europe), Social Technologies Network (Brazil/Argentina), and the Honey Bee Network (India). The book explores the spaces where each of these movements have built, or attempted to build, pathways for developing grassroots innovation, but also the challenges and limitations they have confronted.

The book provides some timely and relevant lessons and recommendations activists, policy-makers, students and scholars of grassroots innovation movements.

Dr Adrian Smith is Senior Researcher at SPRU (Science & Technology Policy Research), University of Sussex, UK.

Dr Adrian Ely is Researcher at SPRU (Science & Technology Policy Research), University of Sussex, UK.

Mariano Fressoli is a researcher at Fundacion CENIT- Centro de Investigaciones para la Transformacion, Argentina.

Dinesh Abrol is a Professor at the Centre for Studies in Science Policy, Jawarhalal Nehru University, India. Elisa Arond is a PhD student at the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, USA, and is also affiliated with the STEPS Centre, University of Sussex, UK.