Mario Pansera

Frugality, Grassroots and Inclusiveness: New Challenges for Mainstream Innovation Theories

Intriguing and provocative concepts such as frugal innovation, Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) innovation, empathetic innovation and inclusive innovation are attracting the attention of many scholars in emerging countries as well as raising concern in Western countries. These notions are often known as ‘below-the-radar innovations’. There are several reasons to believe that technical and social changes originating in the developing world will become major drivers of innovation in the near future. For those reasons, it is crucial to understand how innovation is planned, designed and deployed outside the comfortable territory of the Western paradigm. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the alternative innovation paradigms that are emerging in the developing world. This paper also aims to analyse the determinants and drivers that are at the base of below-the-radar innovation.

Innovation system for sustainability in developing countries: the renewable energy sector in Bolivia

The paper describes the main ideas surrounding the topic of innovation for sustainability in developing countries. Innovation is a crucial element to foster sustainability as well as an egalitarian development. The work illustrates that sustainable development is possible by exploiting local potential and traditional knowledge in order to achieve at the same time economic growth, social equality and environmental sustainability. In order to prove such an assumption a specific case study is described: the renewable energy sector in Bolivia. The case study analyses several dimensions of the innovation process in developing countries such as technological transfer, diffusion and adaptation, social dimension and development issues. The Bolivian case showed that it is possible to foster sustainability and local entrepreneurship by triggering the endogenous energies embedded in territories and traditional knowledge.

Eco-Innovation at the “Bottom of the Pyramid”

The projected exponential rise in the 80 % of humanity living on less than

Framing resource-constrained innovation at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’: insights from an ethnographic case study in rural Bangladesh

10 a day (largely in the developing world) – the so-called “bottom of pyramid (BoP)”’ – suggests that their behavior, lifestyle and consumption patterns will increasingly affect the global economy and society as a whole. While sustainability is a well-established concept in the developed world, understanding of perceptions and approaches to sustainability at the BoP (and associated behavior) is limited. In particular there is little understanding of whether this vast pool of people across the globe “eco-innovate”, and if so how and why. This chapter provides an overview of the main theoretical discussions about innovation and development, with particular attention to eco-innovation creation, transfer and diffusion at the BoP. We challenge the assumption that the “poor are too poor to eco-innovate”, hypothesizing that eco-innovation in the so-called South could play an important role in contributing to global sustainability. The fascinating point in such a debate is whether or not those at the BoP will be able to trigger a change of paradigm on a global basis, pioneering alternative development models that could “blowback” to the developed world. Through an analysis of empirical cases in Asia and Latin America, we demonstrate that eco-innovation does occur at different levels at the BoP, exploiting local potential, traditional knowledge and international connections. We discuss its potential to facilitate social inclusion and support environmental sustainability. These case studies allow us to propose some characteristics of the BOP eco-innovation process, including technological transfer, diffusion and adaptation. We consider their social dimension and the role of international cooperation, leading to development of a conceptual model as a starting point to describe the landscape, purposes and the drivers of eco-innovation at the BoP. These cases suggest that new business models and new policies that foster grassroots eco-innovation might not only be relevant for developing countries, but offer transfer potential from the “south” to the “north” (innovation “blowback”), notably in the context of the extended current period of financial austerity faced by developed countries and the global sustainability crisis faced by us all.