The emergence and diffusion of grassroots energy innovations: Building an interdisciplinary approach

This paper highlights the role of grassroots innovations in enhancing the use of renewable energy sources and proposes a conceptual interdisciplinary framework to analyze their emergence and diffusion in future empirical studies. Drawing on previous literature on grassroots innovations and preliminary empirical studies, our approach contributes to grassroots innovation and energy research and highlights the connections between culture, everyday life and community energy initiatives. We stress the need to study individual and community level behavior and everyday practices in multiple cultural contexts in order to gain deeper understanding on how grassroots innovations emerge. Our study also emphasizes the need to examine the paths how grassroots innovations diffuse.