Exploring Scaling up Mechanism of Grassroots Innovations through Entrepreneurship in India

Abstract

Grassroots innovations are the products created by people at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’. These innovations are developed in resource constrained environments and have put in little or no ‘R&D’. Grassroots innovations are considered to have potential and significance for people in developing countries to solve problems on their own and democratise the process of innovation. Since grassroots innovations are not created keeping in mind the ‘market potential’ of these products, the diffusion of these products through entrepreneurs are widely debated in academic literature. To ‘scale up’ these grassroots innovations, business models are sought by the National Innovation Foundation (NIF) that is committed towards scouting, documenting and commercialising of these innovations in the market. However, the absence of entrepreneurial culture and supporting infrastructure in the informal sector has limited the success of commercialisation of grassroots innovations in the market. The paper discusses the cases of selected grassroots innovations to understand the entrepreneurial process for commercialising such innovations. The paper finds out, during the stages of idea generation and product implementation, none of the grassroots innovators were interested to launch their products commercially. Even though commercialisation through entrepreneurship is regarded as the best way to scale up these innovations, there are other ways like open sharing that could be considered to better diffuse these innovations among the people who would want them the most.