Grassroots Innovation is the voluntary generation and development of innovations by any member of an organization,regardless of function or seniority.^[1]

It is considered a form of bottom-up innovation (seeTop-down and bottom-up design), whereby innovation resides 'deep in the bowels' of an organization,^[2] i.e., it is seen as a responsibility of all members of an organization.

Grassroots innovation offers several benefits to companies:^[3]

• Caters to employees' need forself-determination, boosting their intrinsic motivation
• Leverages the creativity of employees that would otherwise not contribute to innovation efforts
• Helps employees learn how to generate, mature and implement innovation ideas
• Stimulates networking and connections among employees who may not often work together
• Leverages cross-functional synergies and frontline knowledge to generate more customer-centric innovations

Grassroots innovation is, however, associated with two important risks:

• Higher autonomy means employees may drift from firm-wide goals
• High coordination costs, which means that without a careful process design, companies may become disappointed with the results^[4]
• Hard to keep all ideators motivated and properly incentivized^[5]

Researchers in the fields of sustainability and technology have used the term grassroots innovation to refer to "a network of activists and organizations generating novel bottom-up solutions for sustainable development andsustainable consumption; solutions that respond to the local situation and the interests and values of the communities involved",^[6] or as innovations generated by economically disadvantaged people who find practical and creative solutions for the needs of people at thebottom of the pyramid.^[7] These definitions are logically consistent with the definition above but refer to the society or community as the macro-unit of analysis, rather than a firm or organization. As such, they are a direct manifestation of the broader concept ofgrassroots movements in society.

• Innovation
• Workplace programs
• Organizational behavior
• Workplace
• Employee relations

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata