Manifesto: Adrian Smith - Grassroots/bottom up innovation

Grassroots/bottom up innovation: how to facilitate emergence and flourishing
Adrian Smith
STEPS and SPRU, University of Sussex
STEPS Symposium, 24 th September 2009
Brighton

Grassroots innovation from a socio-technical perspective Markets Infrastructure Distribution networks Appropriate knowledge Risk and uncertainty strategies Committed and resourceful participants Business/organisational models Social acceptability Capabilities and skills Social values Key technologies Grassroots innovators need considerable social agency in order to align the material, institutional and discursive elements necessary for a ‘working socio-technical practice’: Idealists and entrepreneurs Institutions (norms and rules) Etc. Work that is about knowledge, technique, organisation, economy, and politics Source: RTS

Prevailing innovation systems and wider modes of provision (socio-technical regimes)
cast grassroots activity in a disadvantageous light due to a variety of interdependent path-dependencies:
Capabilities
Economics
Vested interests
Politics and power
Infrastructure
Institutions
Technological and user cultures
A mix of social and technological, material and discursive processes reinforce one another, directing developments along existing pathways, and disadvantaging alternative developments
BUT!
these regimes are under pressure too (e.g. environmental change, social pressure, demography, development ideologies, internal dynamics and contradictions);
instabilities provide opportunities for alternatives
policies and programmes for grassroots innovation need also to unsettle these regimes
Indifferent mainstream innovation policy aspiration

A multi-level perspective on grassroots innovation Source: Geels (2002) Socially inclusive pathways Dominant / excluding modes of provision Diffusion Scaling-up Translation Grassroots innovations Internal dynamics and contradictions Environmental change, social pressure, demography, development ideologies

Manifesto: Adrian Smith - Grassroots/bottom up innovation

by STEPS Centre on Oct 08, 2009

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Manifesto: Adrian Smith - Grassroots/bottom up innovation — Presentation Transcript