The problem with the word “impact”
Every organisation in this sector can produce a list of projects. Very few can say which of them changed anything, because the words used to describe them do not distinguish between four quite different achievements.
A learner project is valuable. A working prototype is a real accomplishment. A prototype that someone outside the building has actually used is rarer and better. And a grassroots innovation — the fourth rung — is a different kind of thing entirely.
Our stated goal is one hundred local challenges solved by local people, by 2050. A goal like that is only meaningful if the countable unit is defined precisely enough that we cannot quietly move the definition when the count is disappointing.
Three tests, and all three must hold
The problem came from the community
Somebody who lives with the problem named it. It fails when the problem was set for the occasion — a competition brief, a funder’s theme, a lab exercise, or the maker’s own curiosity. Who relayed it is not the test: a mentor naming a real community problem passes.
A user outside the makerspace has tested it
Not a classmate. Not the person who built it. Someone with no stake in it going well.
Someone depends on the outcome
There is a real consequence if it stops working. This is what separates a solution from a demonstration.
The form does not matter — a product, a service or an initiative all qualify. The three tests are about origin, contact and stake, not about technology.
What happened when we applied them to our own record
This is the part worth reading, because it is the part that shows the definition has teeth. We screened past projects that had previously been catalogued as grassroots innovations against these three tests. The results were uncomfortable in a useful way.
The dominant failure was the first test
Among the entries that definitively failed, the largest group failed on problem origin: the problem had been framed by a competition or a lab rather than by the community. Several of these were technically excellent builds.
The largest group was undecided
A substantial bloc could not be decided at all — not because the work failed, but because the record stops after the build. Whether a user existed was never documented, so it cannot now be established either way.
“We do not know” is a different result from “it failed”, and it points at something fixable: the record ended where the interesting question began. It is also a practical argument for the sell loop — a sale leaves a buyer, a price and a date behind it without anyone having to remember to record them.
A note on our own earlier figures: published counts of “changemakers” that predate this gate cannot be read as counts under the definition on this page without re-screening, and are not presented that way.
Where the term comes from
“Grassroots innovation” is not a phrase we coined, and using it carries obligations. The most-cited definition describes innovation driven by social need and ideology rather than profit, rooted in the community that experiences the problem, and resourced through grants and voluntary effort rather than markets[46]. A South Asian strand documents innovation by knowledge-rich but economically poor people, built on unaided innovation and traditional knowledge — and usefully names empathetic innovators, people who solve a problem they did not personally suffer[47].
Two things follow from taking the source seriously.
- The empathetic case is legitimate. A learner does not have to have lived the problem. They do have to have got it from someone who did — which is exactly what the first test checks.
- There is a genuine divergence we should name. The grassroots-innovation tradition positions itself partly against the market economy. This model treats a grassroots innovation as a possible waypoint toward an impact venture. That is a real difference of orientation rather than a detail, and it is stated here rather than left implicit in the borrowed term.
What a strict definition costs us
A looser definition would produce a bigger number. That is the whole temptation, and it is worth stating what we give up.
A strict gate means many good projects do not meet it. A technically excellent build with no community origin and no outside user leaves its maker an Innovator rather than a Changemaker — a complete destination in its own right. It means our own historical figures need re-screening before they can be reused. And it means the goal of one hundred by 2050 is harder than it would otherwise be.
A count is only as durable as the record behind it. A strict definition is what allows the number to stand when someone asks how it was reached.
There is also a live tension we have not resolved and would rather publish than hide. If the genuine historical rate of solved local problems turns out to be materially higher than we assume, then one hundred by 2050 is too soft and should be revised upward — while a tightened definition pushes in the opposite direction. Definition and target therefore have to be decided together. Adjusting either one alone calibrates a target against a definition that no longer applies.