During three decades of its existence, the Honey Bee Network (HBN) has initiated and spawned many efforts to highlight the untapped potential of grassroots innovators in alleviating poverty and generating sustainable development. However, it is important to introspect, debate, analyse and improve upon the limitations of the Network and how to best serve the grassroots innovators and traditional knowledge holders. The first International Conference on Creativity and Innovation at the Grassroots (ICCIG) was held in 1997. The ideas exchanged on this platform gave rise to Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network (GIAN) in 1997 in collaboration with Gujarat Government. The second ICCIG Conference was organised at Tianjin (Dec 3-5, 2012), China and Ahmedabad (Dec 7-8, 2012), India. The third ICCIG was held at IIMA Jan 19-22, 2015.The Conference aimed at gauging the state-of-the-art, reinforcing the Network’s values, and consolidating the lessons learned over the years. In order to enrich the ecosystem for inclusive and empathetic innovations, the fourth ICCIG will pool the insights from the ground and global playfields of ideas, institutions and initiatives.
The Honey Bee Network gives voice, visibility and velocity to creativity and innovative contributions of common people at grassroots for achieving inclusive development. The Honey Bee Network has emerged over the last thirty years as a committed social movement in support of knowledge-rich, economically poor people. Thirty years ago, Honey Bee Network began by a) seeking collaboration between formal and informal sectors particularly in science and technology; b) increasing respect for local/indigenous knowledge for conservation of biodiversity and associated knowledge system, and c) sharing of benefits through ethical supply chains and recognizing, respecting, 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. Earlier the Tianjin Declaration was issued in 2007 in a cooperative research program between IIMA, Honey Bee Network and Tianjin University of Finance and Economics ( http://anilg.sristi.org/tianjin-declaration-for-promoting-green-grassroots-innovation-for-harmonious-development/ ) and Ahmedabad Declaration issued at the end of Second ICCIG (2012) at CMA, IIMA in collaboration with the Honey Bee Network, SRISTI, GIAN, NIF (http://anilg.sristi.org/ahmedabad-declaration-issued-on-the-concluding-day-of-iccig-2-iima-dec-2012-a-plea-for-giving-voice-visibility-and-value-add-to-the-creativity-and-innovation-at-grassroots/ ). The report of the third ICCIG, 2015 is available at http://www.iccig.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/iccig-3-report.pdf. We invite scholars, academics, corporate leaders, policymakers, activists, administrator, local community representatives, organizational leaders, various social and cultural networks engaged in the empowerment of local creativity, public and private initiatives around the world for making society fairer and just in dealing with various social segments. In the 150th year celebration of Gandhi Ji birthday and to reinterpret his teachings, Fourth ICCIG is dedicated to his ideals of self-governance, self-design, frugality and putting the last first-antyodaya.