Grassroots Design Meets Grassroots Innovation: Rural Design Orientation and Firm Performance
March 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-17
Abstract
The study of grassroots design'applying structured, creative processes to the usability or aesthetics of a product without input from professional design consultancies'remains under investigated. If design comprises a mediation between people and technology whereby technologies are made more accessible or more likely to delight, then the process by which new grassroots inventions are transformed into innovations valued in markets cannot be fully understood. This paper uses U.S. data on the design orientation of respondents in the 2014 Rural Establishment Innovation Survey linked to longitudinal data on the same firms to examine the association between design, innovation, and employment and payroll growth. Findings from the research will inform questions to be investigated in the recently collected 2022 Annual Business Survey (ABS) that for the first time contains a Design module.
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