Scaling Local Bottom-Up Innovations through Value Co-Creation

Scaling Local Bottom-Up Innovations through Value Co-Creation

Marradi, C. (TU Delft Education AE)
Mulder, I. (TU Delft Design Conceptualization and Communication)

2022

Bottom-up initiatives of active citizens are increasingly demonstrating sustainable practices within local ecosystems. Local urban farming, sustainable agri-food systems, circular supply chains, and community fablabs are exemplary ways of tackling global challenges on a local level. Although promising in accelerating towards future-proof systems, these hyper-localized, bottom-up initiatives often struggle to take root in new contexts due to embedded socio-cultural challenges. With the premise that transformative capacity can be co-created to overcome such scaling challenges, the current work addresses the identified gap in scaling bottom-up initiatives into locally embedded ecosystems. While how to diffuse such practices across contexts is not straightforward, we introduce a three-phased approach enabling knowledge exchange and easing collaboration across cultures and ecosystems. The results allowed us to define common scalability criteria and to unfold scaling as a multi-step learning process to bridge identified cognitive and context gaps. The current article contributes to a broader activation of impact-driven scaling strategies and value creation processes that are transferable across contexts and deemed relevant for local ecosystems that are willing to co-create resilient socio-economic systems.

co-creation
cross-cultural learning
innovation ecosystems
mission-driven innovation
resilience
scaling strategies
urban food systems
value creation process

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b3b9d0de-2910-4569-91a4-29b6aa46113f

https://doi.org/10.3390/su141811678

2071-1050

Sustainability, 14 (18)

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2022 C. Marradi, I. Mulder