Sustainability-driven innovation at the bottom: Insights from grassroots ecopreneurs

•This paper contributes to the scarce literature on sustainability by grassroots innovators.•We describe eight cases of grassroots ecopreneurs from India.•We find the grassroots ecopreneurs pursuing a triple bottom line approach.•The research unveils a pluralistic and contested way of framing sustainability from the grassroots.

This research focuses on a little studied area within the future of global sustainability, that of grassroots ecopreneurs. While living and working in resource-constrained environments these entrepreneurs strive to create economic value by combining social and environmental goals. Relying on inductive methodology based on eight cases, the paper analyses how innovations are being crafted with little or no resources, yet provoking a great impact in their local communities and beyond. We find the grassroots ecopreneurs pursuing a triple bottom line approach, from the harmonic combination of economic, social and environmental goals that have the potential to shape the future of sustainability on global basis.