Biomedical Engineering Reference
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corporation established by the United States Congress in 1933. TVA was created to
help the Tennessee Valley, a region which was particularly badly hit by the Great
Depression, solve a range of problems which required innovative solutions, such as
the delivery of low-cost electricity to citizens and companies and better manage-
ment of natural resources.
3
On June 25, 1942, the British newspaper
The Times
published an article praising TVA's management style, which involved an approach
aimed at “reconciling overall planning with values of democracy” (Selznick
1949
,
p. 3). To better understand TVA's response to the need for systematic generation of
out-of-the-box innovations, a research project was conducted in 1942-1943 to study
their “democratic” or “grassroots” method (Selznick
1949
). Selznick (
1949
) synthe-
sized the ideas behind this and subsequent studies, while defi ning three essential
conditions behind a grassroots approach in the context of implementation of new
programs of the public enterprise:
•
Managerial autonomy
: the local agency has freedom and power to make signifi -
cant decisions regarding its innovative programs and adapt general values to
local conditions.
•
Active participation by the people in the ranks
: management and government
stimulate people working at state and local agencies to actively and consciously
participate in the development and successful execution of the agency's
programs.
•
Self
-
coordination
: the decentralized administrative agency becomes the key unit
of administration and responsible for coordinating the resources needed, with the
goal of achieving the “job to be done,” thus also assuming the key role in coordi-
nating the work of different layers of the organization (e.g., state and local pro-
grams) with the higher-level goals and vision of the federal government.
The defi nition has then been adapted by different authors who typically equate
grassroots innovation with informal innovation processes. For example, Knight
(
1967
) introduces the concept of bootlegging, which refers to new ideas which are
developed and implemented by highly motivated employees, typically “under
cover from the disapproving power in the organization until it is introduced” (p.
493). Knight (
1967
) also described less contrarian forms of grassroots innovation,
in which groups of innovative employees join in a cohort group or coalition in
order to gain suffi cient political muscle to bring their innovative ideas to life. Yet,
he still classifi ed them as informal mechanisms. By the same token, Huy and
Mintzberg (
2003
) refer to grassroots innovation as
organic change
, which they
defi ne as innovation which “tends to arise from the ranks without being formally
managed” (p. 80).
Over the years, several companies have adopted grassroots innovation princi-
ples. An early adopter was 3M Corp., which has for long allowed its scientists to
spend up to 15 % of their time in projects of their own interest. In the early 1980s
the company was described as nurturing a culture characterized by a “loose
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