Scaling Local Bottom-Up Innovations through Value Co-Creation

Chiara Marradi () and Ingrid Mulder ()
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Chiara Marradi: Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, 2628 CE Delft, The Netherlands
Ingrid Mulder: Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, 2628 CE Delft, The Netherlands

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 18, 1-23

Abstract: Bottom-up initiatives of active citizens are increasingly demonstrating sustainable practices within local ecosystems. Local urban farming, sustainable agri-food systems, circular supply chains, and community fablabs are exemplary ways of tackling global challenges on a local level. Although promising in accelerating towards future-proof systems, these hyper-localized, bottom-up initiatives often struggle to take root in new contexts due to embedded socio-cultural challenges. With the premise that transformative capacity can be co-created to overcome such scaling challenges, the current work addresses the identified gap in scaling bottom-up initiatives into locally embedded ecosystems. While how to diffuse such practices across contexts is not straightforward, we introduce a three-phased approach enabling knowledge exchange and easing collaboration across cultures and ecosystems. The results allowed us to define common scalability criteria and to unfold scaling as a multi-step learning process to bridge identified cognitive and context gaps. The current article contributes to a broader activation of impact-driven scaling strategies and value creation processes that are transferable across contexts and deemed relevant for local ecosystems that are willing to co-create resilient socio-economic systems.

Keywords: co-creation; cross-cultural learning; innovation ecosystems; mission-driven innovation; resilience; scaling strategies; urban food systems; value creation process (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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