Introduction

"People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them."

Tools for Conviviality (Illich 1973, p. 10)

The aspiration to transform our surroundings and to progress is often considered innate in human beings. Such urgency for change, however, acquires different forms depending on the cultural, social and political setting in which it emerges. Since the dawn of modern capitalism, modulated as it has been through competition and "creative destruction" (Schumpeter 1934), change in society has often been driven by technological innovation. The idea that wealth, growth and progress are generated by new (often scientific) knowledge, entrepreneurialism and innovation and that the new is always better than the old, has pervaded and become entrenched in the collective imagination of people at all levels of Western society. Science, technology and innovation are perceived as the foundations for widespread prosperity and better standards of living. Innovation, which is set within the broader construct of the knowledge economy, has become positioned as the mantra for success, driving economic growth and wealth.

This Western imaginary has also penetrated cultures far beyond the West. The capacity to innovate is now considered to be a critical factor that explains why some countries are rich and "developed" whereas others are backward, poor and in need of development. The mantra of innovation has become deeply entwined with the project of development. However, innovation at the periphery of the so-called "developed world" is different. Here, in the so-called "developing world" - one which is not necessarily defined by national boundaries - people rely more on informal economies and networks of subsistence. Institutions that characterize stable Western societies are fragile and sometimes non-existent. In these contexts, the features of socio-technical change evident in industrialized countries become fuzzy and elusive. As Sahlins (1992; 1993) points out, the modernizing wave of techno-capitalism does not sweep away indigenous cultures, but rather triggers unexpected pathways of change within them. This hidden process is occurring everywhere on different fronts. The vast academic field of political ecology has documented how traditional communities all over the world have opposed the process of commodification of natural resources not only through conflict, but also via a process of social and technical rearrangement (Martinez-Alier 2002). Innovation in this context hardly fits the simplistic label of a creative, managed process aimed at bringing something new to the market. Its purposes and goals are contested and subject sometimes to vociferous debate. As innovation meets development, deep questions emerge concerning why people want to change and to what ends, and what people will gain and lose.

This book focuses on the intersections between innovation and development in what are commonly defined as developing countries. In order to introduce the reader to this topic, we start by considering the last three decades or so, which have been characterized by a progressive cross-pollination between the once quite disconnected fields of development studies and business and management. A consequence of this cross-pollination has been that the theory and practice of development is no longer the domain of economists, development scholars and those involved in the funding and delivery of large, often state-funded donor projects. The ideologies of competitiveness, entrepreneurialism, the free market, business management and private-public cooperation - all underpinned by innovation - have entered triumphantly into the field of development, not only bringing with them new actors and new terms, but also re-igniting debates that run deep and go back many years.

I.1. Innovation emerges from under the radar

Until the end of the 1990s, the topic of development, once dominated by development economists, had largely gone under the radar of management, organization and innovation scholars (Kolk and Rufin 2013). There had, of course, been terms such as "appropriate technology" (which emerged in the 1960s) and grassroots technology movements (Smith and Thomas 2014). However, new terms now began to emerge such as "resource-constrained innovation (RCI)" (Agarwal and Brem 2012) and a bewildering array of intriguing and provocative concepts such as "frugal innovation" (Bound and Thornton 2012), "reverse innovation" (Govindarajan and Trimble 2012), "jugaad innovation" (Radjou et al. 2012), "BOP1 innovation" (Prahalad 2010; Prahalad 2012), "Gandhian innovation" (Prahalad and Mashelkar 2010), "empathetic innovation", "pro-poor vs. from-the-poor innovation" (Gupta 2010a; Gupta 2012), "long tail and long tailoring innovation" (Anderson and Markides 2007), "below-the-radar innovation" (Kaplinsky 2011) and, notably, "inclusive innovation" (Heeks and Nugroho 2014). These began to attract the attention of a heterogeneous community of scholars around the world. These forms of innovation are characterized by conditions of material, financial and human resource scarcity (Baker and Nelson 2005; Gibbert and Valikangas 2006; Keupp and Gassmann, 2013), resource insecurity and, sometimes, concerns regarding environmental sustainability (Sharma and Iyer 2012). Their focus in general has been on emerging and developing countries, and specifically: their role in the global value chain (Kaplinsky 2000), their potential to help exploit as yet unexploited markets (Prahalad 2010), and the emergence of indigenous forms of innovation (Smith and Thomas 2014). All those perspectives agree on the fact that innovation capacity - whatever this means - should be enhanced in order to allow these countries to "develop", often advocating an inclusive approach that helps to support the fair distribution of social goods.

This heterogeneous literature is focused on the resolution of (at least) three substantive questions: first, does innovation occur (and if so how) in resource-constrained environments in the so-called developing world (Keupp and Gassmann 2013)? Second, how does innovation contribute to various goals, for example, of social inclusion and poverty alleviation (George et al. 2012; Hall et al. 2012; Halme and Linna 2012), and/or the creation of markets for commercial gain? Third, what are the implications for the so-called developed world (i.e. "innovation blowback" or South-North innovation transfer) (Brown 2005) - acknowledging the globalization of resource scarcity as a contemporary feature of our time - and in turn what are the implications for emerging innovation policy (i.e. a focus on implications, policy and even risks (Gupta 2012))? To these we can add a fourth question: how is such innovation entangled: socially, culturally, environmentally and politically (Levidow and Papaioannou 2017)?

Concerning the first question, there is a rich literature that has attempted to describe how innovation occurs in developing countries, set within a broader historical context largely focused on technology that extends at least back to the seminal work of Schumacher in the 1970s. Fressoli et al. (2014), for example, broadly compare the features of what they describe as "mainstream science, technology and innovation" with "grassroots" framings of innovation for development - we will return to this topic later in the book. This literature itself intersects with a broader literature focused on developed countries which points to more general situations in which resource constraints within organizations enable innovation by "making do with what is at hand" (Baker and Nelson 2005; Garud and Karnøe 2003).

The second question has been only partially explored (Altenburg 2009). From the extant literature emerges a plurality of goals, purposes and motivations, which we will explore in more detail as the book progresses. Innovation scholars in both emerging and developing countries have, for example, advocated concrete actions to set up functional "innovation systems" aimed at overcoming problems of underdevelopment and poverty (Arocena and Sutz 2000; Lundvall and Chaminade 2009; Martins Lastres and Cassiolato 2008; Muchie and Gammeltoft 2003). In stark contrast, others have argued that innovation can in fact be the very cause of inequality and social exclusion (Arocena and Senker 2003; Arocena and Sutz 2003; Cozzens 2007, Cozzens 2008; Cozzens and Kaplinsky 2009). Entrepreneurship and organization scholars publishing in the so-called "BOP literature" (Prahalad 2010) search for opportunities for companies that are interested in opening markets at the BOP through the development of "good-enough" and "affordable" products (London 2009; Prahalad and Mashelkar 2010), aiming to co-produce profits with social goods such as development. These scholars hypothesize that the BOP could be a source of breakthrough innovations (Prahalad 2012) and a huge potential market for multinational corporations (London and Hart 2004; London 2009). In contrast again, others have focused on grassroots movements that want to use innovation to explicitly promote community empowerment, social justice and environmental sustainability, issues which are perceived as being at least in part caused by a free-market ideology (Smith and Thomas 2014). This perspective calls for patterns...