Inclusive Innovation

Robyn Klingler-Vidra, Alex Glennie, Courtney Savie Lawrence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000594911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Innovation offers potential: to cure diseases, to better connect people, and to make the way we live and work more efficient and enjoyable. At the same time, innovation can fuel inequality, decimate livelihoods, and harm mental health. This book contends that inclusive innovation – innovation motivated by environmental and social aims – is able to uplift the benefits of innovation while reducing its harms.

The book provides accessible engagement with inclusive innovation happening at the grassroots level through to policy arenas, with a focus on the South-East Asian region. Focusing on fundamental questions underpinning innovation, in terms of how, what and where, it argues that inclusive innovation has social processes and low-tech solutions as essential means of driving innovation, and that environmental concerns must be considered alongside societal aims. The book's understanding of inclusive innovation posits that marginalized or underrepresented innovators are empowered to include themselves by solving a problem that they are experiencing.

The first in-depth exploration of efforts underway to assuage inequality from policy, private sector, and grassroots perspectives, this book will interest researchers in the areas of innovation studies, political economy, and development studies.

Chapters 1 and 5 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1An introduction to inclusive innovation

DOI: 10.4324/9781003125877-1

Innovation offers potential: to cure diseases, to better connect people, and to make the way we live and work more efficient and enjoyable. At the same time, innovation – especially technological innovation – can fuel inequality, decimate livelihoods, and harm mental health.¹ This incongruence leads us to ask: can we uplift the benefits of innovation for the environment and society while reducing the harms? In this book, we contend that “inclusive innovation” is the form of innovation that strives to meet this ambition. We define inclusive innovation as:

the pursuit of innovation motivated by environmental and societal aims, with problem-owners – often working with multiple stakeholders – responding to challenges experienced in their local context.

The term inclusive innovation was first used in a 2007 World Bank (WB) report, in which Mark Dutz coined the phrase in the context of sustainable innovation in India. He defined it as “knowledge creation and absorption efforts that are most relevant to the needs of the poor.”² The emphasis for Dutz, and for many scholars and policymakers in the years since, was on social inclusion, specifically in socioeconomic terms.

We argue that the notion of innovation for environmental protection and social inclusion purposes is older than 2007. We contend that it has roots in the appropriate technologies (AT) movement that began in emerging economies in the 1960s. The AT movement aimed to assuage the tendency toward innovation investments in – and the gains being captured by – the rich, industrialized world.³ The AT movement, epitomized by the work of Schumacher in Small is Beautiful, argued that innovation should be designed to leverage local inputs – particularly abundant labor – rather than replace them.⁴ Instead of emerging economies inheriting technological innovations that flow from high-income to low-income consumers, Schumacher’s contention was that innovation should be developed by local labor in order to solve local challenges, leverage local resources, and benefit the local environment.⁵ The AT movement, as epitomized by Schumacher’s thinking, advocated for small-scale, but locally-impactful, innovation, especially in developing countries.⁶

Despite the antecedents offered by the AT movement, inclusive innovation today frequently positions societal equality as the goal and high-technology as the solution. “Information and communications technology” (ICT) is too narrow an understanding of the techniques that can foster inclusive innovation, and socio-economic considerations too focused.⁷ Given this, we argue that inclusive innovation should be understood as having (1) social processes and low-tech solutions – in addition to ICT – as essential means of driving innovation, (2) environmental concerns considered alongside societal aims, and (3) marginalized or underrepresented innovators as being able to include themselves by solving a problem that they are experiencing. Problem-owners are understood here as the affected individuals, groups, and communities themselves.

The book shares case studies and stories of inclusive innovation, primarily from across Southeast Asia. We focus on Southeast Asia for three reasons.⁸ First, the region’s dynamism has produced compelling examples of inclusive innovation. Second, the innovation that has fueled the region’s economic growth has also increased inequality and environmental challenges.⁹ Hence, there’s a heightened need for innovation that addresses these challenges. Our third reason is that existing research has focused on inclusive innovation in Africa, Europe and North America. Just as the AT movement resisted the flow of technologies from the US and Europe to developing countries, so do we contend that inclusive innovation should be conceived of, and advanced, in local contexts. Thus, our focus on Southeast Asia, a dynamic, emerging region with ample need for inclusive innovation, which is understudied in terms of inclusive innovation policy and practice.

Defining inclusive innovation

We begin by defining inclusive innovation. First, let’s break the term into its two parts. “Inclusive” refers to a feeling of belonging, of self-determination. The Oxford English Dictionary says simply that it is not excluding any of the parties or groups involved in something. Social justice activist Verna Myers explains symbolically that the difference between diversity and inclusion is one of being invited to the dance (diversity) and being asked to dance (inclusion).¹⁰ Inclusion, then, is about a sense of belonging and an ability to participate in the decisions that shape our lives, and our lives within families, neighborhoods, and cities.

Inclusion can be in reference to many intersectional demographic characteristics, such as disability, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, or sexual-orientation. It can also be in consideration of socioeconomic position, in geographic terms, or in terms of industry and sector. To summarize, we think of inclusion broadly. It can be understood in terms of demographic traits, but also in spatial and industrial terms, and crucially, at the intersection of these different characteristics.

The other half is “innovation,” which is derived from the Latin word novus meaning new.¹¹ Innovation has commonly come to be understood as the development and application of novel products or processes.¹² This includes invention, the filing of patents, and other technology-driven activity, as well as a range of social and management practices, such as new business models. Innovation, in its various incarnations, is essential to achieving economic goals including, yet not limited to, productivity gains, the growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and quality of life improvements.¹³ The challenge, though, is that while innovation is often considered to be a solution for many challenges facing humanity, it can also cause unintended and even negative consequences.¹⁴

Together, inclusive innovation refers to new products, or processes, that strive to improve the lives and livelihoods of problem-owners, marginalized individuals, and often excluded groups (by those actors, rather than for them). The manifestation includes boosting the more equitable distribution of economic gains, and making progress on environmental and societal challenges. There is increasing awareness of unequal rates of participation in innovation, such that women, transgender and nonconforming, ethnic minorities, differently-abled people, immigrants, and those from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds are underrepresented in sectors and roles that produce and benefit from innovation.¹⁵ To begin to remedy this inequity, inclusive innovation places problem-owners as problem-solvers, and in so doing, strives to increase participation in, and benefit from, innovation across demographic, geographic, and industrial domains.

Several terms refer to innovation that has the environment, equity, and societal missions in mind.¹⁶ Table 1.1 alphabetically lists the definitions of these related concepts and details the associated key thinkers and publications.

Table 1.1 Related terms to inclusive innovation (listed in alphabetical order)

Term	Description and key authors
AT	A movement that emphasizes the application of technologies that are suitable to local social and economic conditions that have environmental considerations in mind and that encourage self-sufficiency on the part of those who use them.^50 Here we also include decolonial innovation^51 and place-based innovation,^52 which both emphasize fit with local context.
Assistive technologies	Describes “products or systems that support and assist individuals with disabilities, restricted mobility, or other impairments to perform functions that might otherwise be difficult or impossible.”^53 Here we also note “disability justice.”
Distribution-sensitive innovation	Considers distributive implications in terms of demographic, industrial, or societal dimensions.^54
Frugal innovation	Innovative products are stripped of nonessential features in order to be made available by and for poor consumers; Prabhu defines frugal innovation as “the creation of faster, better, and cheaper solutions for more people that employ minimal resources.”^55
Grassroots innovation	Emphasizes bottom-up solutions by individuals and communities to solve local challenges. Seyfang and Smith define it as “a network of activists and organizations generating novel bottom-up solutions for sustainable development and sustainable consumption.”^56 The Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network (GIAN) defines it as “a modality of inclusive innovation that enables extremely affordable, niche-adapted solutions to local problems, often unaided by the public sector or outsiders.”
Green innovation	Also called “eco-innovation,” “climate innovation,” or “environmental innovation.” refers to “new products, processes or methods that, over the course of their life cycles, reduce environmental risks, pollution, and the negative impacts of consuming resources.”^57 “Blue innovation” is a subset term, referring to innovation that targets ocean health and sustainability.
Mission-oriented innovation	A form of innovation policy that focuses on achieving a societal goal, or mission, such as reducing carbon emissions.^58 Also called “mission-driven” or “transformative” innovation as well as “tech for good.”
Open innovation	Concept was popularized by Henry Chesbrough, referring to the changing dynamics whereby firms increasingly rely upon external resources and logics, and ecosystems are characterized as having greater collaboration across actors.^59
Responsible research and innovation (RRI)	An approach that aims to anticipate and assess potential implications and societal expectations with regard to research and innovation. The concept was popularized in the early 2010s through the EU’s framework programs, which sought to hold research to high ethical standards and ensure that policymakers took responsibility for avoiding harmful effects of innovation, including by engaging the communities affected by innovation.^60
Rural innovation	Innovations serving farmers and people in rural a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Lists of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 An introduction to inclusive innovation
• 2 How: Innovation by and for problem-owners
• 3 What: Innovation for environmental and social good
• 4 Where: Innovation everywhere
• 5 The future of inclusive innovation
• Index