Success factors and challenges of grassroots innovations: Learning from failure

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.