Section 3.1 Making innovations happen

The third chapter of our report has been inspired by two notions. First, innovations come in many forms and sizes. Seconds, innovations are made by people. In this section we discuss grassroots innovations and intermediaries, two concepts from Hargreaves, Hielscher, Seyfang & Smith (2013)’s work that explain the origin of our two chapter claims. 

In a few words, our research in Texel aims at finding out how trigger a grassroots innovation to build the Permanently Innovate sub-system. Grassroots innovations go beyond mainstream initiatives; they try to achieve changes at a socio-technical system level and they explore alternative organizational forms, resource bases, contexts and motivations. For Texel, due to its’ different characteristics, grassroots innovations could be an added value to enable change in the socio-technical system or boost the current transition towards a self-sufficient (sub)system because it needs to re-shape socio-technical systems and not only specific projects.

The resulting sub-system needs to go beyond mainstream innovations and needs to explore different organizational form, resource bases, contextual situations, driving motivations and it needs to pursue many types of sustainable development that can lead to the island’s self-sufficiency.

To achieve that goal, we want to explore the role that current intermediaries have in the island; intermediaries are actors that play key roles in strategic niche management and accelerate innovation processes. So far, we believe that few intermediaries might be active on Texel. Together with the notion that Texelaars work very individualistically, we see a huge opportunity. Intermediaries can enhance the communication and collaboration between existing initiatives and thereby fasten the transition towards a self-sufficient Texel.

We also want to identify intervention challenges and opportunities for current and emergent intermediaries in Texel. Perhaps in the future, Texel itself could be an intermediary for other systems and other grassroots innovations!

References

Hargreaves, T., Hielscher, S., Seyfang, G., & Smith, A. (2013). Grassroots innovations in community energy: The role of intermediaries in niche development. Global Environmental Change, 23(5), 868-880.