On innovation from the edges
In Detroit's abandoned lots, urban farmers grow food for their neighbours using seeds saved from their grandmothers' gardens. Between the ruins of industrial capitalism, a different economy takes root: one based on soil health, community knowledge, and the patient work of healing land. Also based on exhaustion, unpaid labour, and the kind of innovation that only emerges when all other options have been stripped away.
This is where the future grows, they say. Away from the spotlight of corporate innovation labs and university research centres, in the overlooked spaces where people create what they need to survive and thrive. But also where people burn out from having to constantly innovate their way out of systemic abandonment.
Walk through any city and you'll find these laboratories of possibility. Favela residents in Brazil engineer sophisticated water collection systems when municipal services fail, systems that work brilliantly until the next flood overwhelms them. Indigenous communities develop renewable energy cooperatives that serve both cultural preservation and climate resilience, while still fighting for basic sovereignty over their land. Migrant communities create informal networks of childcare, translation, and economic support that put official integration programmes to shame, until someone gets deported and the network fractures.
The margins become margins through deliberate processes. Redlining, disinvestment, policy decisions that concentrate resources elsewhere. These spaces where dominant systems have withdrawn investment, attention, care become laboratories partly by choice, partly by force. When you can't rely on institutions, you improvise. When markets exclude you, you create alternatives. When experts don't listen, you become your own expert and also carry the burden of having to prove your expertise constantly.
In rural Wales, when the last bank branch closed, villagers started their own community bank, learning banking regulations while grieving what they'd lost. In London tower blocks, residents formed food cooperatives when supermarkets moved out, creating abundance while fighting the stigma of living in "food deserts." On reservations across North America, traditional ecological knowledge guides renewable energy projects that benefit tribal communities while navigating complex federal regulations that weren't designed with sovereignty in mind.
These innovations emerge from necessity, creativity, and also from the weight of having to solve problems that shouldn't be theirs to solve. They're glimpses of different ways of organising life that prioritise relationships over profit, community wellbeing over individual accumulation, long-term sustainability over short-term gain. They're also responses to trauma, displacement, and the particular exhaustion that comes from being resilient all the time.
The seeds of transformation germinate in places where the old systems have already broken down, but also where new systems struggle to take root in contaminated soil. Crisis creates space for experimentation and also creates urgency that can overwhelm careful planning. Necessity mothers invention and sometimes smothers it with immediate need.
When these innovations prove successful, something predictable happens. Dominant institutions arrive with funding, documentation requirements, scalability demands. Microfinance began as women's savings circles in global South communities, spaces of mutual support and collective decision-making. When banks scaled it up, it became another form of debt extraction, keeping the language of empowerment while changing the power structure entirely.
The power of marginal innovations lies precisely in their rootedness, their responsiveness to local conditions, their accountability to community needs rather than distant shareholders. But this rootedness also makes them fragile when key people leave, when funding changes, when gentrification arrives. They cannot be replicated like franchises because they emerge from specific relationships between people and place, and also because the conditions that create them are often conditions no one should have to live with.
Universities study these communities, consultants package their methods, policymakers point to them as examples of "community resilience." Meanwhile, the people doing the actual work of innovation often remain under-resourced, over-studied, and asked to present their survival strategies as inspiration rather than indictment.
What would it mean to reverse the usual flow of innovation, to recognise that transformation rises up from the edges? Perhaps it would mean changing the conditions that create margins in the first place. Perhaps it would mean that innovation could be a choice rather than a survival strategy.
This requires different kinds of attention and different kinds of power. Listening to communities that have been practicing alternatives out of necessity, while also listening to what they say they actually need. Supporting innovations that prioritise care over scalability, while ensuring the innovators themselves are cared for. Recognising that the wisdom we need for an uncertain future often lives in communities that have been marginalised by the systems creating our crises, while not romanticising the conditions of that marginalisation.
The future doesn't belong to those who dominate the present. It grows in the spaces they've abandoned, tended by hands they've overlooked, guided by knowledge they've dismissed. But it also grows slowly, carefully, vulnerably, in soil that's often been depleted by the very systems it seeks to replace.
In every margin, something is taking root. The question isn't just whether we're paying attention, but how we're paying attention, and what we're prepared to change about the conditions that create margins in the first place.