Paper long abstract:

In recent times of crises, innovation has been recognised as a critical response to multiple social and economic challenges. However, innovation has often been criticised as a narrow techno-scientific project aiming at profit maximisation (Felt et al. 2007). Such understandings are also manifested in the more recent Europe 2020 Innovation Union (2010; 2013) in which ideas of 'inclusion' are also reduced to the potential of innovations to contribute to economic growth. Thus, innovations evolve into 'conservative projects' (Suchman and Bischop, 2000), or top-down practices of exclusion whose orchestration is limited to the participation of specific 'innovators', while marginalising the role of other networks or communities in such processes (Felt et al. 2007).

Inspired by above critiques, this paper aims to contribute to re-thinking innovation in a more 'inclusive' way. Drawing on the LIVEABLE CITIES and the FAAN projects, it focuses on a diversity of small-scale, bottom-up projects of collective experimentation involved in alternative mobility and agro-food practices (e.g. car-sharing, community food growing, co-ops, etc.). By employing the political economic discourse of the moral economy (Sayer, 2000; 2006), it aims to unfold the multiple inclusive angles of innovation: a. involving a wider set of actors, b. going beyond a narrow technocentric and econocentric understanding of innovation, c. addressing wider societal goals of inclusion, cohesion and equalities. Thus, it aims to suggest an alternative conceptualisation of 'inclusive innovation' that can lie in the moral economy of such initiatives, as well as the wider sets of symbolic meanings and values attributed to them.