Grassroots social innovation, co-production and foresight: community rebooted

The concept of ‘social innovation’ is still rather vaguely defined. Definitions range from innovations “to meet social needs and create new social relationships or collaborations” , to “innovations that are social in both their ends and means” . A largely un-mapped area of social innovations, although some might be quick in questioning their innovativeness, is that of “grassroots innovations” including community currencies such as time banks, mutual exchange currencies or barter systems. These are driven by two key goals: firstly, to satisfy social needs of disadvantaged people or communities through helping to develop their capacities; and secondly, by an ideological commitment to develop alternatives to the market-based economy model adopting principles like citizens’ empowerment, democratic organisation, solidarity, social cohesion, social responsibility and sustainable development. Such initiatives form examples of ‘coproduction’ in public services, delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours. Grassroots innovations and coproduction seem to be linked in a mutually enforcing cycle. They share similar features and challenges and lead to similar types of impacts underlined by motives such as social inclusion, equality, solidarity and solidarity. Foresight can claim to offer an appropriate approach for orchestrating their development by helping to overcome several of their common challenges and especially those related to capacity building, social learning, aligning different views and motivations under joint visions, social capital and trust building and linking local intelligence to higher-level policies.Foresight and grassroots innovations such as those examined in the paper are underpinned by the same principles of public participation, democratic deliberations, and equality facilitating coproduction and alignment of different viewpoints and interests under jointly defined visions and strategies. In this regard, foresight can help such initiatives in their development as much as they can help foresight upgrade its processes to deal with challenges of the 21st century that demand reaching out to society in trying to build a sustainable future.