It surveys how this term is defined in the published literature — what the sources agree on, where they diverge and what remains contested — and carries its own numbered bibliography. It does not describe what we run. Programme policy is on the core pages.
Our own use of the word is often narrower than general usage; the short definition and the boundary are in the glossary, under Grassroots innovation. The review date below matters, because the literature moves.
A definitional review. Citations follow IEEE style; see References.
Abstract
Grassroots innovation is an established research field, but it is not a single one. Two strands developed the term largely independently — a European strand rooted in sustainability transitions, and a South Asian strand built around the Honey Bee Network — and they define it by different criteria. This article sets out both definitions, the feature that separates grassroots innovation from market innovation, the amendment that admits an innovator who is not the sufferer, the catalogue of movements the field recognises, and the aided-versus-unaided question the literature leaves open.
I. Definition
The most-cited definition is Seyfang and Smith’s:
We use the term “grassroots innovations” to describe networks of activists and organisations generating novel bottom-up solutions for sustainable development; solutions that respond to the local situation and the interests and values of the communities involved [1].
Two features of the wording carry weight. First, the unit of analysis is a network, not an individual or a device — grassroots innovation is defined at the level of the organised effort. Second, the qualifying test is responsiveness to a local situation and to community interests and values, not novelty in the technical sense.
The South Asian strand defines the same term by a different property. For Gupta, grassroots innovations are “innovations by knowledge rich-economically poor people” [2] — the criterion is the epistemic and economic position of the innovator, and the corpus is built on “unaided people’s innovations and outstanding traditional knowledge” [2].
These are not restatements of one another. Seyfang and Smith locate the concept by the economy and orientation of the producing network; Gupta locates it by who the innovator is. A case can satisfy either while failing the other, and the literature does not adjudicate between them.
II. Origins
A. The sustainability-transitions strand
Seyfang and Smith’s 2007 paper in Environmental Politics is the field’s usual starting point [1]. Its stated contribution was to join two literatures that had not been joined: “Innovation and community action are two important strands for sustainable development. Yet they have not hitherto been linked. Community action is a neglected, but potentially important, site of innovative activity” [1]. The paper is explicitly agenda-setting — it proposes a research and policy programme rather than reporting a study — which is worth remembering when it is cited as though it established an empirical finding.
B. The Honey Bee strand
Gupta’s account describes a network that by 2012 had been scouting, spawning and sustaining innovations for more than twenty years, with a database of more than 140,000 ideas, innovations and traditional-knowledge practices, pooled mainly from 500 districts of India and some other parts of the world [2]. This strand is institutional and inventorial in a way the European strand is not: it is a working method for finding innovations that already exist, with a corpus to show for it.
III. What distinguishes grassroots innovation
Seyfang and Smith’s Table 1 sets grassroots innovation against market-based innovation on four axes [1]:
| Market-based | Grassroots | |
|---|---|---|
| Context | market economy | social economy |
| Driving force | “Profit: Schumpeterian rent” | “Social need; ideological” |
| Organisational form | firms | “voluntary associations, co-ops, informal community groups” |
| Resource base | commercial income | “grant funding, voluntary input, mutual exchanges, limited commercial activity” |
The discriminating feature is therefore neither smallness, nor poverty, nor technical simplicity. It is the economy the innovation is produced in and the force driving it. On this definition grassroots innovation is positioned partly against market innovation: what disqualifies a case is not failure but the presence of the profit motive as the driver.
Note also that the driving force has two components in the source — social need and ideological — which are not the same thing. A response to material deprivation and a response to conviction both qualify, and much of the field’s internal variety follows from that pairing.
IV. Empathetic innovation
A common assumption about grassroots innovation is that the innovator is the person suffering the problem. Gupta explicitly rejects this as a requirement:
There are many innovators who did not suffer from a particular problem themselves but felt strongly about the suffering of others… A very large number of grassroots innovations have been triggered by such empathetic interactions [2].
Empathetic innovations are thus a named category within the field, not an edge case. The amendment loosens the identity between innovator and beneficiary while keeping the requirement of proximity: the trigger is an interaction with the affected party, so the relationship survives even though the shared condition does not.
V. The catalogue of movements
The field’s consolidating text is Smith, Fressoli, Abrol, Arond and Ely’s Grassroots Innovation Movements [3], which treats grassroots innovation as a family of movements rather than a scattering of cases. It covers six:
- Movement for Socially Useful Production
- Appropriate Technology Movement
- Peoples’ Science Movements
- Makerspaces, Hackerspaces and Fablabs
- Social Technologies Network
- Honey Bee Network
The movements are characterised as networks developing solutions through “unconventional settings” and “unusual combinations of people, ideas and tools,” addressing issues neglected by formal institutions [3]. The publisher’s description adds that such networks operate “unencumbered by disciplinary boundaries, policy silos, or institutional logics” [3].
The inclusion of item 4 is the significant point for anyone using the term: the fabrication workshop is a documented category within the field, not an extension of it. Two strands that otherwise differ are also brought into one frame here, since the Honey Bee Network appears as a movement alongside it.
⚠️ Sourcing caveat. Smith et al. [3] was not read for this review. The statements in this section are description-verified only — they rest on the STEPS Centre and publisher descriptions of the book, not on its text. The book is open access (doi: 10.4324/9781315697888) and should be read before any of this section is leaned on.
VI. Limitations
One name, two constructs. The two strands were developed independently and rest on different discriminators — network economy and orientation [1] versus the innovator’s position [2]. Nothing in the literature reconciles them, so a study, inventory or policy built on one is not straightforwardly comparable with one built on the other.
The aided/unaided fault line is unresolved. This is the field’s sharpest internal disagreement. Gupta’s canonical innovator is unaided — the corpus is expressly built on “unaided people’s innovations” — and the Honey Bee method is to scout innovators who already exist [2]. Seyfang and Smith’s unit is a network that is frequently constituted deliberately and resourced by “grant funding, voluntary input, mutual exchanges” [1], which presumes external support rather than excluding it. Whether an innovation produced with facilitation, funding, equipment or expert mentoring is still grassroots therefore has no settled answer. It is not a pedantic question: the size of the countable population changes with the answer.
The resource-base criterion cuts awkwardly. Read strictly, defining grassroots innovation partly by “limited commercial activity” [1] makes commercial viability definitionally corrosive — an innovation that grows into a trading firm leaves the category rather than succeeding within it. This is an observation about the definition’s structure rather than a finding reported by the source, but it follows directly from the Table 1 criteria and anyone applying them should expect to meet it.
The consolidating text is unread here. Section V is description-verified only (see the caveat above), so the six-movement catalogue and the wording attributed to [3] should be checked against the open-access text before being used as evidence.
References
[1] G. Seyfang and A. Smith, “Grassroots innovations for sustainable development: Towards a new research and policy agenda,” Environmental Politics, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 584–603, 2007, doi: 10.1080/09644010701419121.
[2] A. K. Gupta, “Innovations for the poor by the poor,” International Journal of Technological Learning, Innovation and Development, vol. 5, no. 1/2, pp. 28–39, 2012, doi: 10.1504/IJTLID.2012.044875.
[3] A. Smith, M. Fressoli, D. Abrol, E. Arond, and A. Ely, Grassroots Innovation Movements, ser. Pathways to Sustainability. Routledge, 2016, ISBN 978-1-138-90122-3, doi: 10.4324/9781315697888. (Open access. Description-verified only for this review — not read in full.)