Grassroots innovations and its indicators in Iran

Grassroots innovations are informal, indigenous, and local solutions carried out by ordinary people with no experience in formal and organized sectors to solve problems. The aim of this paper was identifying grassroots innovations in Iran and developing related indicators.It was a mixed method research with explanatory design; Therefore, the research was conducted in two parts: qualitative and quantitative. First, by examining the research literature in this field, the existing indicators for Grassroots innovations were extracted and approved by experts using the Delphi technique; then, based on these indicators, the questionnaire was designed. The validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by experts using the CVI index and then it was sent to officials in areas related to popular innovation in different provinces. Out of 213 questionnaires received, 116 were identified as Grassroots innovations based on the extracted indicators and were quantitatively analyzed. Findings in the quantitative part showed that in this study, the average age of popular innovators was 36 years, 15% of innovators were women and 85% were men. The highest number of participants in this study was related to the provinces of South Khorasan and Fars province. People with a bachelor's degree had the highest frequency. The areas of Grassroots innovations in this study were mostly in the technical field (37%), agriculture and animal husbandry (21%) and environment and art (12% each). In the qualitative stage, 21 Grassroots innovators were interviewed. Then, in order to qualitatively analyze the interviews and questionnaires, the Colaizai’s method was used and the findings showed that grassroots innovation in Iran in seven main themes including problem solving, environmental protection, being economical, applicability, government independence, availability and the use of technology is defined and these themes include sub-themes that were introduced as indicators of grassroots innovation in Iran. The findings of this section also confirmed the samples of the quantitative section.