Exploring grassroots innovation for sustainable development in entrepreneurial ecosystems

This chapter focuses on grassroots innovation (GI) for sustainability within entrepreneurial ecosystems. GI is “bottom-up” social innovation generated by civil society with the aim of promoting long-term sustainability. Despite its growing importance, there is a lack of research on GI from an entrepreneurial and managerial perspective. This chapter aims to bridge this gap by proposing a conceptual framework based on the entrepreneurial ecosystem from a grassroots perspective. The objective is to provide a model that analyzes GI through a holistic approach, integrating considerations regarding policymakers, active citizenship, institutions, workers, social culture and shared knowledge. This research presents a detailed literature review of GI and entrepreneurial ecosystems. It then posits a conceptual model based on a reinterpretation of Isenberg’s (2011) framework on entrepreneurial ecosystems. The main theoretical contribution of this chapter is its expansion of the entrepreneurial ecosystem literature through a focus on GI for sustainability and an enhanced understanding of the relationships between different stakeholders that have not previously been considered. The main practical contribution of this chapter is a better appreciation of how GIs develop within society and facilitate their reproduction or scaleup.