Grassroots innovation: A review and a meta-theoretical sustainability assessment framework.

• The significance of radical innovations for sustainability is elucidated from the perspective of diverse discourses. • Grassroots innovation (GI) as a radical innovation paradigm with unconventional agents, goals and practices. • A research gap in the systematic analysis and assessment of the sustainability of GIs persists. • A meta-theoretical framework for assessing the sustainability of radical innovation and GI is proposed. • It integrates the culture and tools of diverse discourses and takes a systems thinking view on the evaluation of innovation. Diverse discourses converge into the importance of broadening the focus of sustainability innovations from merely cleaner technologies to more radical, paradigmatic innovations. Here, we focus on grassroots innovation (GI) as a radical innovation paradigm whose agents, goals and practices are fundamentally different from conventional innovation. Researchers typically attribute GIs the potential to influence the transition toward more sustainable production and consumption. Through a systematic literature review, we find that a research gap in the systematic analysis of GIs' sustainability persists. We thus propose a meta-theoretical framework to systematise the sustainability assessment of GIs across three system levels: product, organisational model and socio-technical system. Our framework delineates how the theory and tools from sustainability assessment and sustainable business models may enrich sustainability transitions studies in the analysis of grassroots, and more broadly, radical innovation, providing a systems thinking view and increasing the credibility and reflexivity of sustainability arguments in transition studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]