One word for very different results
Every organisation in this field can produce a list of projects. Very few can say which of them changed anything, because the words used to describe them do not separate four quite different achievements.
A learner project has value. A working prototype is a real achievement. A prototype that a real user outside the project team has actually used is rarer and better. A grassroots innovation, the fourth rung, is a different kind of thing altogether: a solution that passes all of the tests below.
Our goal is one hundred local challenges solved by local people, by 2050. A goal like that only means something if what is being counted is defined clearly enough that nobody can move the definition when the count is disappointing.
When a problem counts as solved
The problem came from the community
Someone who lives with the problem named it. The test fails when the problem was set for the occasion: a competition brief, a funder’s theme, a lab exercise, or the maker’s own curiosity. Who passed the problem on does not matter: a mentor who names a real community problem passes.
A real user who is not on the project team has tested it
Not the person who built it, and not a judge or a visitor who was shown a demonstration. A real person who has the need. A fellow learner counts if the need is really theirs.
Someone depends on the outcome
Something real goes wrong for someone if it stops working. This is what separates a solution from a demonstration.
The form does not matter: a product, a service or a community initiative all count. The tests ask where the problem came from, whether a real user has tried it, and whether anyone depends on it. None of them is about technology.
What the tests found among our past projects
We checked the past projects we had described as grassroots innovations against these three tests.
Most failures were on the first test
Among the projects that clearly failed, the largest group failed on where the problem came from: a competition or a lab had set the problem, not the community. Several of these were technically excellent builds.
The largest group could not be decided
A large share could not be decided at all. The work had not failed, but nothing was written down after the build, so we do not know whether anyone ever used it.
“Not known” is a different result from “it failed”, and it can be fixed by following a project past the build. It is also a practical argument for having learners sell their work. A sale leaves a buyer, a price and a date behind it, without anyone having to remember to write them down.
Our earlier counts of “changemakers” were made before these tests existed, so they do not use this definition.
Where the term comes from
We did not invent the phrase “grassroots innovation”, and using it comes with obligations. The most-cited definition describes innovation that is driven by social need and shared beliefs rather than profit, rooted in the community that lives with the problem, and paid for through grants and volunteer effort rather than through markets[46].
A line of research from South Asia documents innovation by people who are rich in knowledge but poor in money, building on their own ingenuity and traditional knowledge. It also names empathetic innovators: people who solve a problem they do not suffer from themselves[47].
This has two consequences.
- The empathetic case counts. A learner does not have to have lived with the problem. They do have to have heard about it from someone who has, which is exactly what the first test checks.
- There is a real difference to name. The grassroots-innovation tradition sees itself partly as an alternative to the market economy. We treat a grassroots innovation as a possible step toward an impact venture: a venture that grew out of a community challenge and is working toward paying its own way, but cannot yet do so without support.
What a strict definition costs
A looser definition would give a bigger number. The strict one has three costs.
- Many good projects do not pass. A technically excellent build with no community origin, and no real user from outside the project team, leaves its maker an Innovator rather than a Changemaker. Innovator is a complete stage in its own right.
- Past figures need checking again before we can reuse them.
- The goal of one hundred by 2050 is harder than it would otherwise be.
A strict definition is what allows the number to stand when someone asks how it was reached.
One tension has not been resolved. If the real past rate of solved local problems turns out to be much higher than assumed here, then one hundred by 2050 is too easy and should be raised. A stricter definition pushes the other way.
So the definition and the target have to be decided together. Changing only one of them sets a target against a definition that no longer applies.