Success factors and challenges of grassroots innovations: Learning from failure

Leo Dana, Calin Gurău, Frank Hoy, Veland Ramadani and Todd Alexander

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2021, vol. 164, issue C

Abstract: Grassroots innovation projects have the potential to generate novel, bottom-up solutions that respond to local situations, interests and values – solving the social, economic and environmental problems of marginalized communities; however, these projects can raise important challenges during their design, testing, development and implementation. Although extant studies identify some of these problems, the literature and practice lack a comprehensive diagnostic tool that can effectively predict the potential and success of grassroots initiatives. For this reason, important problems are often neglected, and failed projects are not thoroughly investigated and analyzed, which leads to missed opportunities of corrective learning. This study addresses this knowledge gap, proposing a diagnostic tool based on existing theoretical frameworks, which is then validated by investigating a failed grassroots innovation initiative, in order to identify its major shortcomings, and learn to avoid them in future projects. The findings also outline the role and importance of a socially inclusive approach for an effective deployment of grassroots initiatives, clarifying the relationship between grassroots innovation success and local community involvement.

Keywords: Grassroots innovation; Success factors; Challenges; Strategic diagnostic tool; Community involvement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162517314002
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:164:y:2021:i:c:s0040162517314002

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2019.03.009

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().