ABSTRACT
Whatever the outcome of this social and political struggle, one thing is certain: unless public policy supports frugal and grassroots or BRI, which contribute towards meeting local basic needs, a number of community-generated technologies might fail the same way that ‘appropriate’ and ‘intermediate’ technologies failed in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet this support should not necessarily be institutional. Public policy should rather avoid developing more formal/cosmopolitan institutions of innovation. Our research suggests that such global institutions rarely have a BNAbased vision. This explains why they can fail particularly in supporting grassroots innovation. On the other hand, unless a BNA-based vision can move emerging innovation models beyond the local and towards disrupting existing global innovation hierarchies, frugal and grassroots or BRI are also bound to decline.
