Innovation is increasingly said to be vital for responding to global challenges like sustainable development. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that networks of community groups, activists and researchers have…
Six grassroots innovation movements, and why they matter
Makerspaces: Creating inclusive spaces for sustainable innovations
Making stuff is all the rage these days. But how does sustainable development fit into this enthusiasm? The White House is celebrating a Week of Making from June 16-23 2016…
Restart Podcast: Adrian Smith on grassroots innovation
The London-based Restart project, which promotes community repair for electronics, interviewed STEPS researcher Adrian Smith for their latest podcast, ‘Searching for the roots of grassroots innovation’. In it, Adrian discusses…
Stories from STEPS: Float like a Fab Lab, sting like a Honey Bee
The second in a series of digital stories from the STEPS Centre looks at movements and experiences of ‘grassroots innovation’ and ‘inclusive innovation’ around the world, and asks how they…
Maker culture and sustainability
What are citizen labs and ‘maker’ culture providing to sustainable development? STEPS researcher Adrian Smith was part of a panel discussing this question at an event on 18 November in…
Adrian Smith on grassroots prototyping at SCORAI Europe
Adrian Smith, STEPS Grassroots Innovation project convenor, will talk about grassroots prototyping past and present to a SCORAI (Europe) workshop on sustainable consumption at Kingston University today. The flourishing of…
Technology & democracy: the story of Brazil’s Social Technology Network
A new STEPS working paper tells the story of a recent experiment in grassroots innovation – the Social Technology Network (STN) in Brazil. The paper, by Mariano Fressoli and Rafael…
STEPS Summer School 2014 – Elsie Khakasa’s review
Guest post by Elsie Khakasa, STEPS Summer School 2014 participant. This post is reposted from Elsie’s blog with kind permission. Two weeks of a thought provoking and intense summer school…
Grassroots fabrication in makerspaces: the importance of culture, context & relationships
On Thursday 10th April 2014, the Grassroots Innovations project organised a half-day World Café workshop in Copenhagen on the topic of grassroots fabrication in makerspaces. It formed one session within…
Inclusive innovation: learning to listen to the excluded
Last week I spent a fascinating couple of days at the OECD Symposium on Innovation and Inclusive Growth, where discussion kept returning to the challenge of scaling-up inclusive innovation. Unsurprisingly,…