Inclusive Innovation

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.

Robyn Klingler-Vidra is Reader in Political Economy at King’s College London. Her research focuses on entrepreneurship, innovation and sustainability, with a focus on East Asia. She is the author of The Venture Capital State: The Silicon Valley Model in East Asia.

Alex Glennieis Senior Policy Manager at the Innovation Growth Lab at Nesta. Her work focuses on supporting governments to develop more inclusive and experimental innovation policies, and she has published a number of reports on the theme of inclusive innovation.

Courtney Savie Lawrence is a climate, systems and social innovation practitioner. She has lived and worked in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and the US across the grassroots to government spectrum, including cofounding the Circular Design Lab and working with the UNDP and UNICEF innovation teams.