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Borderline innovation, marginalized communities: universities and inclusive development in ecologically fragile locations

ABSTRACT Where do the notional boundaries of the concept of innovation lie, and what does this mean for the study of innovation in socially marginalized settings, where changes are localized, incremental, informal, and social? How can this help us understand new aspects of innovation and inclusive development? To explore these questions, we draw on an evidence base describing university interactions with highly marginalized communities in South Africa, Uganda, and Botswana. These universities have established interface structures through which participative knowledge-building has led to new processes and social structures that have helped communities to address their livelihoods challenges. At the same time, universities have benefitted from the interaction, gaining from the communities’ local knowledge. This paper explores the characteristics of these interactions in order to open up a new empirical frontier, and also to reflect on the utility of innovation systems theory for understanding borderline cases of innovation that take place in informal settings and marginalized communities.