ICCIG 5

The Fifth International conference on creativity and innovation at/for/from/with grassroots [ICCIG 5]

Indian Institute of Management, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad

Jan 28-30, 2025

In collaboration with Centre of Management in Agriculture, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Honey Bee Network institutions and several other international and national institutions.

Giving voice, visibility, and velocity to creativity and innovative people at the grassroots has been the key goal of inclusive development. Honey Bee Network has emerged over the last thirty-five years as a committed new social movement in support of knowledge-rich, economically poor people. In order to enrich the ecosystem for inclusive and empathetic innovations, the Fifth ICCIG will pool the insights from the ground and global playfields of ideas, institutions, and initiatives by policymakers and also by local/global communities and networks. The conference invited contributions on inclusive innovations from the grassroots from scholars, activists, policymakers, and innovators themselves.

Honey Bee Network started more than three decades ago to raise the voice of collaboration between formal and informal sectors, respect for local/indigenous knowledge for the conservation of biodiversity and associated knowledge systems, sharing of benefits through ethical supply chains, and rewarding local communities and individual innovators and traditional knowledge holders. Today, the concern for inclusive innovation has become much more widespread but the voice of the knowledge-rich, economically poor people and the youth is still not heard adequately.

We invite scholars, academics, corporate leaders, policy makers, activists, administrator, local community representatives, organizational leaders, various social and cultural networks engaged in the empowerment of local creativity, and public and private initiatives around the world to make society more fair and just in dealing with various creative social segments.

Key Themes

1. Institutional transformation

1.1 Common property resource institutions play a critical role in sustainable natural resource management at all levels of society. The conservation concern has been declining while designing infrastructure projects. How to give voice to perfect strangers and other natural beings is becoming a big challenge for conservationists.

1.2 Public/private, civil society institutions create norms for the exchange of knowledge, information, resources, and ideas across formal and informal sectors. How do we create mutual accountability in the norm-setting processes in both sectors?

1.3 The crafted institutions often fail to build upon existing institutional infrastructure. The political economy of existing institutions needs careful analysis to expand the space and scope for disadvantaged people. The grafted institutions build upon existing norms and values in managing resources and therefore may have higher sustainability. The issue needs to be debated and elaborated.

1.4 Public delivery systems impact the life of almost every citizen world over. The need for transparency and social accountability has triggered a lot of experiments and innovations in public systems. These need to be consolidated so that the change agents involved in these transformations can ally themselves with other creative people.

1.5 New commonly managed repositories/databases of cultural, natural,technological and other creative outputs are scarce. We invite such open database curators to share their experience in crowd sourcing the collective intelligence in making such repositories institution-building experiences.

Public policy for empathetic innovation

1.6 Many countries and companies have started open innovation platforms in the recent past but adequate reciprocity towards the knowledge providers remains to be institutionalized. What role can public policy play so that knowledge exchange between the formal and informal sectors can become smoother?

1.7 The role of public, private, and civil society organizations in the development and diffusion of extremely affordable innovations remains fuzzy. Recent studies on the subject have to be critically evaluated to identify future directions.

1.8 The innovations in public governance and delivery systems play an important role in fueling democratic aspirations. How have different countries looked at increasing expectations and declining performance of the formal systems? What are the lessons one can learn from China, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and European societies that need blending for inclusive development?

2. Cultural Creativity

2.1 How does one prevent the deskilling of society through large-scale employment programs building upon manual rather than mental labor, ignoring in the process unique cultural and other skills?

2.2 Can entrepreneurial open collaborative platforms be generated for nurturing folk and grassroots culture and its incorporation in developmental programmes and philosophies?

2.3 The culture of creativity spawns numerous innovations at grassroots without which the engine of economic and social progress would not run. What are the facilitators and inhibitors of cultural creativity in different societies? The culture of resistance provides the fodder for pluralism and diversity. What are the emerging trends in strengthening such resistance in the wake of globalization and massive consumerism?

2.4 While culture occupies such an important space in our consciousness, the governance including the ministry dealing with culture is considered a very lowimportance position. Nations are built or destroyed depending upon how the cultural core of the society evolves through various struggles.

2.5 Can conscious creativity be shaped by different modes of entertainment that society patronizes?

2.6 How can cultural traditions reinforcing solidarity across classes, ethnicities and religious boundaries be recognised and preserved?

3. Educational innovations

3.1 Can innovations in government schools in which the poorer children often study, become the hub of educational policy?

3.2 How do we democratize disadvantaged children’s access to high-quality content and mentors?

3.3 Can teachers learn from the students and build upon their curiosity, compassion and empathetic value system?

3.4 The academia-industry-informal sector linkage in higher education is weak, what are the strategies which have worked? Can educational entrepreneurship get more encouragement?

3.5 Can innovations by technological youth become a pivot of frugal engineering, products and services for inclusive development? How can students of higher education search, spread, celebrate innovations and sense the unmet needs of various societies? Start-up movements has shown potential and reviews of transformative experiences will be welcome.

3.6 Innovation in the governance of education need systematic cataloging for promoting lateral learning

4. Technological innovations

4.1 The concepts of deviant research, grassroots innovations, frugal, empathetic or inclusive innovations, and farmers’ or workers’ innovations were much less recognized 35 years ago when the Honey Bee Network was born. How do we assess the contemporary terminological and conceptual clarity or confusion in these concepts? Can we distinguish innovation ‘from’ vis-à-vis ‘for’ grassroots?

4.2 To what extent have various countries recognized the need for redefining the concept of the National Innovation System to include the bridge between formal and informal systems of innovation? Much remains to be done in this regard.

4.3 Can companies and other organizations in the public and private sectors join hands with innovations by youth and the informal sector to create genuine and authentic reciprocity and responsibility in the knowledge exchange?

4.4 What can we learn from the models of benefit sharing emerging through validation and value addition in people’s knowledge and creativity? Why have these models remained so underdeveloped in most parts of the world? What are the implications of such asymmetry and lack of accountability between formal and informal systems for the sustenance of grassroots frugal/empathetic innovation systems?

4.5 What lessons can be learnt from various models of inclusive innovation around the world? What are the gaps in the inclusive innovation ecosystem including the investment and entrepreneurial spaces in society?

4.6 What drives people to devise extremely affordable frugal solutions? What is the tolerance limit of a tradeoff between accuracy and affordability (particularly in the post COVID phase when vaccines with much less accuracy were accepted) and how does it affect its accessibility and acceptability?

4.7 What kind of new heuristics are learned from thousands of grassroots green innovations and traditional knowledge examples for innovations in totally unrelated sectors as well as for other communities? How do we learn from these innovations at four levels: [a] artefactual, [b] analogic, [c] heuristic and [d] gestalt or configurational?

4.8 How do we link corporations and communities in developing the most frugal and affordable sustainable solutions for meeting the unmet needs of society, particularly women farmers and workers, elderly and special needs people?

4.9 Farmers field schools have spawned a lot of bottom up solutions but they remain to be properly mainstreamed. What kind of new platforms are needed to achieve this goal?

Innovations in urban spaces for more accessible, accountable and available social infrastructure

4.10 Given the rural-to-urban migration, a lot of knowledge has moved to urban spaces. The urban markets are often unable to discriminate or valorize such placebased knowledge. Urban renewal through the knowledge of urban ‘refugees’/migrant population. Urban regions are becoming concentrated centres of poverty as a result and thus rural and urban renewal through social innovations need to be conceptually and operationally linked.

4.11 Before the erosion of knowledge becomes irreversible, what kind of strategies can be developed for knowledge-based enterprises in urban areas that put special emphasis on the traditional/tacit knowledge of urban workers?

Designing organizations/social networks/open innovation platforms for linking formal and informal sector in reciprocal, respectful and mutually rewarding manner

4.12 Many place-specific problems are evident when we look at the unmet community needs; the ability of the formal system to develop niche-specific solutions is limited. Are there examples of such cooperation between formal and informal systems which leads to sustainable solutions to address unmet needs?

4.12 Blending or bundling of knowledge of formal and informal systems is crucial for creating open innovation platforms and networks for empowering creative communities

Integrating women’s knowledge creativity and innovations in the innovation ecosystem

4.13 The knowledge of women and other workers has been given far less importance so far. How do we expand opportunities for women and worker innovators?

4.14 Which kind of institutional innovations facilitate the uncovering of the creative potential of women?

4.15 Women’s knowledge often remains muted out of deference or socio-cultural constraints, uncovering it required new pedagogies

5. Mind to market: Innovation, Investment and Enterprise

5.1 Innovative strategies for using social media, e-commerce and other platforms to link grassroots to Global [g2G] markets; Help innovation-based Start-ups to scale up, link them with public procurement and other support systems, expand testing and certification facilities for hard technologies at concessional terms.

5.2 Role of differential risk/angel/early-stage incubation/patient/nursing capital in scaling start-ups/GRI
5.3. Protection of intellectual property rights of knowledge holders, the evolution of the concept of ‘Technology Commons’ and open-source technologies.

5.4 The central concern would be to explore how large corporations can join hands with small innovators to reach the consumers/knowledge producers/innovators at the base of the economic pyramid.

5.5 How do recognition and reward for innovators influence their motivation to collaborate and deal with markets and public institutions collectively?

5.6 Which of the new IP models can do justice to the need for protection and incentives for collaboration?

5.7 Why do we still lack risk funds to support grassroots innovations and enterprises

6. Natural Resource Management: Community perceptions and innovative response for a sustainable future

6.1 Given the erratic nature of weather induced changes in many parts of the world, the traditional coping strategies are becoming weaker. What kind of institutional and technological interventions are required to increase the capacity of communities to cope with climate risks? Are there innovative models available, which have achieved enhanced resilience?

6.2 Agro-biodiversity has played an important role in improving resilience in the wake of risks. However, consumer preference for traditional varieties has not kept pace with time. What are the strategies that have reversed the erosion of agrobiodiversity and associated knowledge systems?

Circular economy and green supply chain to support innovations for and from grassroots.

6.3 Why should society turn to grassroots innovators for frugal designs? As grassroots innovators use second-hand components to a large extent, their innovations are often not recognized in the formal sector, more so in the legal fraternity as standards for them do not exist. So, what are the steps necessary to “legitimize” these innovations and the impetus they would give to popularize the circular economy?

Biodiversity conservation, benefit sharing and development of bio-enterprises and ethical supply chain

6.4 Despite deliberations at the intergovernmental panel at WIPO, Convention on Biological Diversity, Desert Conventions, etc., not much seems to have changed. What are the policy directions that can help us move towards a new consensus? Case studies of knowledge-based interface /bio-enterprises between communities and outside organizations are welcome.

6.5 Mapping the biodiversity resources along with the associated knowledge system through students and other groups of youth is very essential since more knowledge (and also resources) is eroding in the current generation than ever before in the history of humankind

6.6 Urban farming, urban biodiversity conservation, providing urban spaces for organic farmers and several other such connections can be explored

Co-organizers:

ICCIG is being organized by Grassroots Innovations Augmentation Network (GIAN) in partnership with the Centre for Management in Agriculture, CMA, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad; SRISTI, Ahmedabad, Honey Bee Network, and is likely to be supported by NABARD and a few other sponsors

The enquiries for organizing workshops, panel discussions, innovation exhibition and other activities during the conference may be sent to iccig@gian.org. Those who wish to organize parallel sessions of their own networks alongside the conference may also write so that synergy can be exploited for creating an empathetic network of networks.

Suggestions for sponsorship, co-sponsorship or funding travel and stay of the international or national participants are most welcome.

Registration fees of USD 50 (Rs 4000 for Indians excluding stay) may be deposited in favor of GIAN , student scholars may pay only USD 15 (Rs 1000). We will facilitate stay in some of the simple hostels nearby and intimate hotel details where one can book directly

Last date for the abstract is 31st October 2024 and Full paper/posters/ performance is expected by 30th November 2024. Please share this announcement with others in your professional and social network.

Some of the selected papers will be published as a part of our series with Springer-Nature on inclusive & frugal innovations edited by Dr RA Mashelkar & Prof. Anil Gupta.

A special issue of Science, Technology and Society will be taken out to publish certain outstanding papers presented at the Fifth ICCIG.

Submit abstract and papers at: Iccig@gian.org

Academic Coordinator:	Logistics:	Administration Coordinator:
Prof Anil Gupta	Mr. Chetan Patel	Ms. Dipali Chauhan (cma@iima.ac.in)
Prof Ranjan Kumar Ghosh	Mr. Ramesh Patel	Mr. Kiran Thete (kirant@iima.ac.in)
Dr. Anamika Dey	Mail at: iccig@sristi.org	Dr. Sandeep Umap ( sandeepu@iima.ac.in )

                                                                                                                                                   Mr. Prashant Purohit ( prashantp@iima.ac.in )

Bank Details for Indian participants

Name: GUJ GRASS ROOTS INNOVATION AUGMENTATION NETWORK
Account No: 10307643779
Branch: IIM Ahmedabad
IFSC Code: SBIN0002653
Branch code:- 002653 SWIFT Code: SBININBB412

Bank Details for Foreign participants

Name: GUJARAT GRASSROOTS INNOVATION AUGMENTATION NETWORK (GIAN)
Account No: 40192056726
IFSC Code: SBIN0000691, SWIFT: SBININBB104
Branch Code: 00691
Branch Name: New Delhi Main Branch