Exploring Maker Innovation: A Transdisciplinary Engineering Design Perspective

Researchers, designers, and engineers embrace the ongoing maker movement and view ‘grassroots innovation’ as essentially important for staying competitive in both academia and in industry. The research team gives full play to its expertise on innovation and entrepreneurship education. In the past five years of actively participating in the China-U.S. Young Maker Competition, the team coached and worked with over five hundred student makers to create innovative engineering prototypes focusing on the areas of community development, education, environmental protection, health and fitness, energy, transportation, and other areas of sustainable development by combining innovative design and emerging technologies. Several conceptual designs and developments are described. A transdisciplinary engineering design and teaching approach is presented and discussed. Due to the limited time allowed by the competition, more thorough design and development iterations will take place in a future study.

ANALYSIS OF GRASSROOTS INNOVATION PRACTICE TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN MALAYSIA

Grassroots innovation is an activity that uses multiple resources or indigenous technology to create an innovation more creatively. The innovations are often utilised to improvise the community and environment. The invented product or process is created at the bottom of the pyramid due to necessities, difficulties, and challenges. Malaysia thrives to become a high income developed nation through several initiatives, such as lifelong learning and innovation. Malaysians are encouraged to undertake education programmes to enhance knowledge and skills. These grassroots activities need to be discovered as they affect income and social values. The local grassroots innovators have difficulty commercialising the innovations due to a lack of skills, knowledge, and technology. This study aimed to identify the grassroots innovations, the process in developing innovation, and complement the innovation towards commercialisation. Local innovators adapt to the new product development process as a mutual understanding and for grassroots sustainable development.

The Grassroots Innovation of Customary Forest Management: A Case Study of Kulawi-Marena Community in Sigi Regency, Central Sulawesi

The Kulawi-Marena community is one of the communities with customary law units located in Sigi Regency, Central Sulawesi.They have inhabited the area around the forests of the Lore Lindu National Park (TNLL) long before Indonesia became a country. The Katuvua customary law system is a mechanism for effective natural resource management in preserving forests and ensuring social order, rather than the governance applied by national park managers. The writing of this article is based on research conducted by the author with the Indonesian Institute for Forest and Environment (RMI) with the support of FAO funds in 2018. Qualitative methods were used in the data collection process through Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), in-depth interviews, and Focus Group Discussions (FGD). This article describes the customary forest management practices by the Kulawi-Marena community based on the Katuvua customary law system. Furthermore, this article shows that this practice is a form of grassroots institutional innovation that reflects "sodality" according to the understanding that has been formulated by Prof. Tjondronegoro which in this case is for the context of people outside Java. This kind of grassroots innovation in forest management based on customary law can be used as a lesson for efforts to resolve agrarian conflicts around conservation areas.

Opening Up The Tools For Doing Science: The Case Of The Global Open Science Hardware Movement

Open science hardware (OSH) is a term frequently used to refer to artifacts, but also to a practice, a discipline and a collective of people worldwide pushing for open access to the design of tools to produce scientific knowledge. The Global Open Science Hardware (GOSH) movement gathers actors from academia, education, the private sector and civil society advocating for OSH to be ubiquitous by 2025. This paper examines the GOSH movement’s emergence and main features through the lens of transitions theory and the grassroots innovation movements framework. GOSH is here described embedded in the context of the wider open hardware movement and analyzed in terms of framings that inform it, spaces opened up for action and strategies developed to open them. It is expected that this approach provides insights on niche development in the particular case of transitions towards more plural and democratic sociotechnical systems.

Narratives of Socioecological Transition

This article explores narratives and characteristics of sociological transitions displayed by members of the Transition Network (TN) in Portugal. It is informed by scholarly work on grassroots innovations, sociological transition narratives, and environmental engagement in Portugal. It furthers this research in three ways: (1) it analyzes an original case study—the Portuguese TN; (2) it identifies and defines the various socioecological narratives conveyed by its participants; and (3) it interprets the TN’s sociopolitical appeal as a grassroots innovation in the context of environmental mobilization in Portugal. Drawing on 20 semistructured interviews with current and former members of the Portuguese TN, three narratives of sociological transition were identified—utopianism, inevitability, and pessimism—as well as seven characteristics that motivated interviewees’ engagement with the TN.

Vietnam and innovation in COVID-19 testing

Vietnam made global headlines for its effective management of the first wave of COVID-19. Now, at the time of writing in Spring 2021, although there are occasional instances of imported cases in the headlines, in Vietnam the country’s battle with the virus is often spoke of in past tense. After all, the country has responded effectively to each wave, by implementing localised, targeted lockdowns in an effort to quell outbreaks, and through a combination of government, business sector and grassroots innovation that lessened the spread of the virus and ameliorated the impact of the lockdown. To give context to the scale of Vietnam’s tremendous response, through June 2020 the country had fewer than 400 cases and 0 deaths. While the ultimate outcome from the pandemic remains to be seen, we believe there are important lessons to be learnt by analysing the determinants of Vietnam’s innovative actions to flatten the curve. In this review, we distil five lessons: (1) a shared purpose is an essential motivator, (2) grassroots and small business entrepreneurs are important innovators, (3) multistakeholder collaboration is a powerful force, (4) contextual innovation is essential, and (5) the state is a key enabler of timely innovation. We focus, in particular, on the case of innovation occurring in affordable COVID-19 test kit development in Vietnam.