Abstract

This chapter introduces the second of our selected alternative approaches to innovation: ‘inclusive innovation’. This approach to innovation explicitly aims to address the grand challenge of poverty and inequality, particularly in the Global South (or so called ‘developing world’) contexts. It aims to address recognised failures in approaches to ‘international development’ relying on state aid and contextually insensitive ideas of technology transfer from ‘North to South’. In the chapter we outline conditions giving rise to and antecedents of inclusive innovation. These include the failures of state-sponsored international aid, as well as the fact that advances in science and technology and mainstream innovation did not straightforwardly ‘trickle down’ and contribute to better standards of living worldwide as originally hypothesised. The chapter introduces and unpacks the diversity of terms and practices associated with inclusive innovation, which variously include ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid innovation’, ‘value chain innovation’, ‘grassroots innovation’ and ‘frugal innovation’. The chapter delves into the importance of capacity building and introduces philosophical perspectives on inclusion and difference, which point to the importance of forms of inclusion which are not based on tightly integrative or homogenising logics, but which are alert instead to the value of different ontologies or ways of being, doing and knowing from beyond the Global North and industrialised world.