Mario Pansera

University of Vigo | UVIGO

A growing body of research is investigating the connections between the discursive construction of circular economy (CE) and its influences on public policies that promote the socio-technological transition towards circular production and consumption systems. However, surprisingly little attention has focused on how CE discourses interact with scie...

Drawing on ecological economics, post-development studies, and political ecology, this paper argues that sustainable development notions have run their course within sustainability marketing debates and proposes degrowth as an alternative framework to steer disciplinary debates in new directions. We chart unexplored territory, offering sustainabili...

We explore smart city development, with a focus on the modalities of citizen participation, using an institutional logics approach. Taking Mexico City as our case study we describe the presence and dynamics of several logics influencing smart city development. At an organisational level we identify the bureaucratic and technocratic logics underpinn...

Much of the smart cities literature urges greater citizen participation in smart city innovation. However, there is often little consideration given to how citizens might be more meaningfully involved in the processes of governance around smart cities, what enables their involvement, or what might need to change in order to facilitate their partici...

A growing body of research is investigating the connections between the discursive construction of circular economy (CE) and its influences on public policies that promote the socio-technological transition towards circular production and consumption systems. However, surprisingly little attention has focused on how CE discourses interact with scie...

The ‘Circular Economy’ has become a new buzzword in debates about sustainability. Circularity, however, is usually presented in terms of scientific and technological challenges that often neglect the socio-political aspects related to the transition towards more sustainable futures, such as participation, co-creation and social justice. We argue th...

The feasibility and desirability of endless economic growth is being increasingly questioned by scholars and activists. Whilst envisioning alternative economic models is key to assure the sustainability and wellbeing of present and future generations, few studies have analysed what might be the role of 'innovation' in a post-growth era. Innovating...

Innovation fuelled by Science & Technology is seen as the panacea for growth, inclusive development and international competitiveness. Aligned with this view, there is a growing interest in the role of academic entrepreneurship in contributing to these goals. A huge emphasis is also given to ready-made, transportable success models of innovation to...

We describe the institutionalisation of responsible innovation (RI) over the last decade at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and universities funded by it as a focal point for RI in the UK. Drawing on organisational theory we identify factors influencing the dynamics of RI institutionalisation, including forces of legi...

This paper discusses how science and technology parks (STPs) act as intermediaries for projects regarding green innovation. The empirical evidence is gathered through a case study of the City of Knowledge in Panama. For the recent Panama channel’s expansion, local authorities faced the need to improve the water resource management to secure enough...

Innovation is generally considered to be the antidote to economic stagnation. But while the coupling of ‘responsible’ and ‘innovation’ has been much discussed, that of ‘responsible stagnation’ has gone largely unexplored. In this book, we take this concept seriously as a means to question the political economy of science, technology and innovation,...

Over the last decade the discourse of responsible innovation (RI) has become a significant feature of debates concerning the relationships between science, innovation and society in the fields of biosciences and biotechnologies. We document how this discourse has evolved over the period 2014–2019 at a Synthetic Biology Research Centre hosted within...

Innovation is generally considered to be the antidote to economic stagnation. But while the coupling of ‘responsible' and 'innovation’ has been much discussed, that of 'responsible stagnation' has gone largely unexplored. In this book, we take this concept seriously as a means to question the political economy of science, technology and innovation,...

This chapter discuss the implications of Responsible Innovation for the Global South. It highlights the complexity and challenges of innovation in the Global South, drawing on the reflections of anthropologists and post-colonial scholars to consider how responsibility (beyond growth) and RI might be relevant to countries in the Global South, withou...

El artículo analiza el concepto de “responsabilidad” aplicado a la ciencia, la tecnología y la innovación (CTI) en 12 países. A través del análisis de 23 casos, se muestra cómo la noción de “responsabilidad” y las dimensiones de “anticipación”, “inclusividad”, “reflexividad” y “capacidad de respuesta” (el llamado marco AIRR – Anticipation, Inclusiv...

In the last decade, the concept of “Circular Economy” (CE) has gained prominence in the political and corporate discourse around the world. According to its proponents, CE represents a new paradigm that will push the frontiers of environmental sustainability by transforming the relationships between ecological systems and economic activities. In th...

The feasibility and desirability of endless economic growth is being increasingly questioned by scholars and activists. While envisioning alternative economic models is key to assure the sustainability and wellbeing of present and future generations, few studies have analysed what might be the role of ‘innovation’ in a post-growth era. Innovating h...

Today many of the great expectations generated by technology in the 1960s remain unfulfilled. Alongside the optimism that drove technological development, sceptical views on the promises of technology have become popular and senses of deception, reflection, even hostility, emerged within Western societies. One such group is the Degrowth community,...

In the last decade, the concept of 'Circular Economy' (CE) has gained prominence in the political and corporate discourse around the world. According to its proponents, CE represents a new paradigm that will push the frontiers of environmental sustainability by transforming the relationships between ecological systems and economic activities. In th...

In this paper we analyse how energy and carbon intensity indicators, that have huge popularity among policy makers, are framed in the discourse of think tanks, consulting groups and other stakeholders. What emerges from the analysis of public documents, reports and policy briefs is that intensity indicators are often framed uncritically and unrefle...

Owen, R. & Pansera, M., (2019). Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation in “Handbook on Science and Public Policy”, (Eds) Dagmar Simon, Stefan Kuhlmann, Julia Stamm, Weert Canzler, Edward Elgar publishing: Cheltenham. https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/handbook-on-science-and-public-policy

During the period between the 1930s and the 1950s, there were discussions concerning the need for institutions for learning and competence building, designed to address the legacy of poverty left by colonial rule. This chapter describes the position taken by one group emerging from this period as an illustrative example of a counter narrative to th...

This chapter discusses the linked concepts of discourse, framings and narratives as an interpretive and analytical framework. In the chapter, innovation is located at the very center of the contemporary development discourse. In order to understand the role of innovation in the discourse of development, it is crucial to understanding how both those...

Words are bent and bowed, sometimes forged from scratch, to provide meanings that give sense to our daily lives and practices. This chapter demonstrates that buzzwords such as “innovation” and “inclusion” are the subject of similar interpretative battles, in the same way that post‐development scholars have analysed the notion of development itself....

The chapter begins by briefly reviewing growth theories and innovation, the “evolutionary theory”, and the important perspective of innovation systems in developing countries. These lay the foundations for a deeper, critical review of the literature on innovation and development, describing those competing narratives of innovation for development t...

Retail companies focusing on bridging the gap between rural producers and national and international urban markets are mushrooming in the country. This chapter describes the case of one of these companies, a company called Mother Earth (ME). ME arose in 2011 from Industree Crafts, a social enterprise founded in 1994. The Industree family connects d...

This chapter describes one of the academic centers of excellence, the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB), and its business incubator, the N S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL), founded with a generous grant by Mr Nadathur S Raghavan, co‐founder and former Joint Managing Director of Infosys. Founded in 1973, the IIMB...

This chapter provides the case that concerns the activities of the Bangladeshi social enterprise Grameen Shakti (GS). The Grameen Shakti case presents many characteristics of the BOP narrative described. The poor are positioned as unserved clients in need of energy, the provision of which can empower them. They no longer need to put up with energy...

In recent years, the search for innovative pathways towards sustainability has been brought to the forefront of international agenda settings. While international organisations and institutions, such as the United Nations and the European Union (EU), mobilised around the grand challenge of sustainability, on both a local and a global scale, eco-inn...

Innovation, often tempered by the language of inclusion, has become an indispensable element of contemporary development policy and practice in the so-called Global South. Driven by multinational companies, public–private partnerships and social enterprises, “innovation for development” aims to co-produce social goods (things of value) such as pove...

Policy Brief

This deliverable reports the findings of the UK national RRI case study. It first provides an analysis of RRI at a UK level, contextualised by an understanding of the national science, technology and innovation policy environment, science-society relations in the UK and, associated with these, configurations of role responsibilities. It reports the...

La società contemporanea è ormai indissolubilmente legata allo sviluppo della scienza e della tecnologia e degli enormi benefici da esse apportati nel campo dell'agricoltura, dell'ingegneria, della medicina e di altri innumerevoli campi. Tuttavia, lo sviluppo tec-nologico può presentare grandi interrogativi etici, basti pensare alle biotecnologie,...

Frugal innovation has become a popular buzzword among management and business scholars. However, despite its popularity, I argue that the frugal innovation literature, in its present form, is problematic for at least two reasons. First, the frugal innovation literature assumes that scarcity is a normal condition of the “Global South”. In this artic...

Although the public debate tends to privilege investor-owned organizations, alternative forms of organization are mushrooming at the borders of the capitalist economy. In this work, we contribute to the debate on alternative economies by analysing a specific form of worker-owned organizations originating in Italy in the 1970s and recognised by Ital...

The concept of 'inclusive innovation' for development has become increasingly prominent in both academic and policy discourses, raising important questions as to how this is being framed. Results from case studies conducted in India suggest inclusive innovation to be interpretively flexible and contested. One case presents a grassroots framing emph...

Este artículo explora los conceptos de innovación popular e innovación frugal y su potencial para la generación de un conocimiento capaz de producir un desarrollo más sostenible e inclusivo. La innovación frugal o popular, a menudo llevada a cabo en condiciones de escasez de recursos materiales y financieros, intenta solucionar de manera simple, pe...

Fourteen key stakeholders from the UK Research Councils, Innovate UK, academia and civil society came together to discuss the past, present and future of responsible innovation in the UK and how it is being translated into practice. The academic community and Research Councils in the UK have been key to the development and translation of the RI dis...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a critical analysis of the innovation discourse, arguing that a more contextualised understanding of the challenges of innovation for development and poverty reduction in low-income economies will help the authors’ to unravel new development opportunities and provide alternatives to conventional capi...

Edited by Dr. Mario Pansera and Professor Sally Randles The objective of this report is to show the results of the EU funded project ‘Innovation for Sustainability’. During four years, this research initiative has provided training and funding for eight early-stage researchers and two experienced researchers to investigate sustainability-driven in...

By drawing on an ethnographic research conducted in India, the research shows how the discourse of ‘social enterprise’ aspires to transform the productive routines of traditional artisans in rural settings to meet the requirements of the global market. The research focuses on a hybrid cross-sectoral partnership between a retail company named Mother...

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 ana...

Keywords: Degrowth from the Global South Technological innovation Discourse of development a b s t r a c t Our research focuses on the cross-pollination of the discourses of innovation and (post)development in the Global South. We suggest that the buzzword innovation is progressively infiltrating the lexicon and situated practices of development. W...

A shift in the entrepreneurial landscape is taking place brought about by grassroots innovators with little formal education and technological knowhow, living and working in penurious environments. This research represents an emerging third wave of literature on Bottom of the Pyramid innovation, where products are offered for and by the underserved...

The discourse of Sustainable Development has reinvigorated the idea that technological innovations are inescapable to sustain economic development and simultaneously achieve environmental sustainability. In this paper, we propose a framework to describe six possible combinations of innovation and demand/consumption levels that constitute in turn si...

Resource constrained-innovation (RCI) at the so-called ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ (BOP) in developing countries has attracted the attention of a growing number of scholars, who present different and sometimes conflicting narratives within which such innovation is framed. These variously frame innovation as supporting the opening up of new markets in t...

The process of technological innovation is widely considered to be crucial to enable human development and to guarantee environmental sustainability. However, the process of development in the so-called Global South has delivered controversial outcomes in terms of social and environmental sustainability. Does this setting present new forms of susta...

The paper is an attempt to understand innovation from social constructivist framework and an effort to theoretically map how innovation embodies social goals and power relationships. It examines how socio-cultural approaches can reveal deeper insights in understanding different facets of socio-technical change. We argue that the concept of innovati...

The projected exponential rise in the 80 % of humanity living on less than $10 a day (largely in the developing world) – the so-called “bottom of pyramid (BoP)”’ – suggests that their behavior, lifestyle and consumption patterns will increasingly affect the global economy and society as a whole. While sustainability is a well-established concept in...

Intriguing and provocative concepts such as frugal innovation, Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) innovation, empathetic innovation and inclusive innovation are attracting the attention of many scholars in emerging countries as well as raising concern in Western countries. These notions are often known as ‘below-the-radar innovations’. There are several r...

The paper describes the main ideas surrounding the topic of innovation for sustainability in developing countries. Innovation is a crucial element to foster sustainability as well as an egalitarian development. The work illustrates that sustainable development is possible by exploiting local potential and traditional knowledge in order to achieve a...

This paper analyses the current status of rural renewable energy in Bolivia and provides and employs an analysis framework to study the network of stakeholders that determines the adoption, absorption and diffusion of renewable energy technology. The study, moreover, illustrates the impact and implications of traditional indigenous knowledge on the...

Intriguing and provocative concepts such as frugal innovation, Gandhian innovation, empathetic innovation and inclusive innovation are attracting the attention of many scholars in emerging countries as well as raising concern in the Western industry that looks at emerging markets more and more as disrupting competitors rather than as a land of conq...

In the near future the access to basic needs in a world of 7 billion people will be strongly influenced by the 80% of humanity living in the so-called 'developing world'. Their consumption patterns and their approach to sustainability will undoubtedly reshape the scenario of global economy. The understanding of the evolution of eco-innovation in th...

Nowadays, eco-friendly technologies are considered a strategic objective in industrialised countries. Rising demand for more sustainable products and services from civil society has become a major challenge for policy makers. The present article aims to provide a historical perspective on the concept of eco-innovation, its different meanings and it...

The aim of this paper is to describe and present the results of the automatic detection and assessment of bradykinesia in motor disease patients using wireless, wearable accelerometers. The current work is related to a module of the PERFORM system, a FP7 project from the European Commission, that aims at providing an innovative and reliable tool, a...

Parkinson's disease (PD) predominantly alters the motor performance of the affected individuals. In particular, the loss of dopaminergic neurons compromises the speed, the automaticity and fluidity of movements. As the disease evolves, PD patient's motion becomes slower and tremoric and the response to medication fluctuates along the day. In additi...

The current work describes a methodology to automatically detect the severity of bradykinesia in motor disease patients using wireless, wearable accelerometers. This methodology was tested with cross validation through a sample of 20 Parkinson's disease patients. The assessment of methodology was carried out through some daily living activities whi...

The PERFORM project is building a novel application for the home-based monitoring and assessment of people with neurologically based movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). PERFORM includes a hospital-based EHR data-analysis and mining system compatible with HL7. For EHR to include monitoring dat...

A "Multi-parametric system for the continuous assessment and monitoring of motor status in Parkinson's disease" (PERFORM), is an FP7 project from the European Commission that aims at providing an innovative and reliable tool, able to evaluate, monitor and manage patients suffering from motor neurodegenerative diseases. The current work is related t...

In this work we present a system for the monitoring and management of neurodegenerative diseases, such as the Parkinson's Disease (PD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The purpose of the system is to monitor patient's motor symptoms, and assist the clinician in the evaluation of both the current patient status and the disease progression. T...

The present work describes a methodology that will serve as the base for a human gait analysis module for the assessment of Parkinson's disease (PD). The module is composed by a network of five wireless accelerometers located on the limbs and trunk. The current work shows that it is possible to discriminate the complexity of the gait patterns betwe...

Cited By :5, Export Date: 11 October 2017

The efficient management of big cities requires the knowledge and the integration of the several data necessary to describe the huge number of variables that govern the urban environment evolution. In developing countries, where the resources are scarce or in-homogeneously distributed, the problem of acquiring reliable data is amplified by the unfa...