Inclusive innovation from the lenses of situated agency: insights from innovation hubs in the UK and Zambia

Inclusive innovation has been criticized for not being theoretically strong and remaining as a ‘catch-all-ideas’ concept. In this paper, it is argued the concept has failed to take into account how structures of disadvantage may exclude individuals. This is addressed by introducing the concept of situated agency through the lenses of intersectionality to better understand the process of exclusion or inclusion experienced by people. The paper draws on empirical evidence from two innovation hubs in the UK and Zambia to see in what ways they represent inclusive spaces for women entrepreneurs. Interpretive research methods including semi-structured interviews and participant observation are used to understand how these women are evaluating their work and experience at the hub. Findings include that while female members of the hub attribute discrimination primarily to their gender, other intersecting identities are also determinates. As such, while some hubs can provide a more inclusive space, they can also reproduce and reinforce the gender inequalities present in the wider societal context. This has implications for inclusive innovation, that while temporarily tempering institutional and contextual constraints, what is required is a broader structural and contextual approach

Digital Access is not Binary: The 5'A's of Technology Access in the Philippines

Online political participation has been presented as a possible solution to declininglevels of trust in traditional politics. However, the most marginalised communities areoften the least connected and participate least in digital citizenship programmes. Muchexisting literature rests on a binary understanding of citizens as being either connectedor unconnected. Progress is therefore often understood simply as a process of“connecting the unconnected.”This paper presents primary empirical research fromthe Philippines, which suggests that such binary understandings disguise more thanthey reveal. We argue that it is descriptively more accurate and more analytically usefulto recognise that multiple classes of technology access exist, which limit digital citizen-ship in multiple ways. Qualitative methods were used to learn from non‐users and theleast connected about the barriers to online civic participation that they experience.The 5'A's of Technology Access was employed as a framework to analyse those barriersand reveal the social and economic factors that they reflect, reproduce, and amplify.Findings suggest that nonbinary and nontechnical understandings of the barriers todigital inclusion are essential to any effective attempt to remove the remainingobstacles to genuinely inclusive digital citizenship