Business and management articles from across Nature Portfolio

The Covid-19 pandemic has further evidenced the potential of grassroots actors as initiators of digital innovations, in the form of open-source applications, platform cooperatives, and other crowdsourced digital artifacts. These innovations played a crucial role in mitigating the impact of lockdown measures, specifically serving the needs of communities often neglected by commercial offerings from large tech companies. Grassroots digital innovations (GDIs) have long been recognized by scholars and policymakers as potential remedies to market distortions and social iniquities within digitalization processes. Nevertheless, these initiatives have historically struggled to become sustainable. Recent evidence confirms that many GDIs developed in response to the global health crisis are now facing financial issues that threaten their survival. In this commentary, we reflect on this challenge and assert that GDI literature exhibits several shortcomings that contribute to undermining the long-term stability of these initiatives and their capacity to foster more inclusive, just, and sustainable digitalization processes. We examine how these shortcomings can be addressed to enhance both GDI research and practice. Our discussion focuses on three major methodological and conceptual limitations: a tendency towards theory-devoid empiricism, a bias towards successful cases, and a dearth of longitudinal, multi-site analyses. We discuss the causes of each shortcoming and illustrate how they impact both the theoretical and practical development of GDIs. Drawing on this critical examination, we identify four priorities to advance future GDI research: leveraging methodological pluralism, applying theoretical sampling, enhancing qualitative longitudinal research, and strengthening methods for data collection and archival. These priorities aim to inform the agendas of academic communities, funding bodies, and policy institutions dedicated to harnessing the potential of GDIs for more sustainable and inclusive digitalization processes.

The potential of efficiency to support decarbonization is underestimated and overlooked relative to more expensive and intensive actions. Implementing resource and energy efficiency strategies in industry could deliver rapid and cost-effective decarbonization.

XPRIZE Water Scarcity was introduced to stimulate measurable innovations in desalination systems and materials, which will contribute substantially to solving the water crises of the coming decades.

Uncertainty is a ubiquitous, yet often misunderstood condition studied by academia. In the humanities, subjects wield it as a tool, using it as a source of inspiration and entertainment. In the social sciences, subjects consider it a weapon that, when controllable, is leveraged for competitive advantage and, when not, is defended against to minimize harm. We describe the dangers of its misunderstanding—specifically, those arising from mistaking untreatable uncertainties as treatable ones and vice versa. We draw from the analysis of these uses and misuses of uncertainty to make a call to action to improve how we study and address this unique condition that makes strategic decisions so much harder to optimize.

Stress urinary incontinence (SUI), a frequently underdiagnosed condition that mainly affects women, lacks effective and long-term treatment options. MUVON Therapeutics has developed a tissue-engineered advanced therapy medicinal product for the treatment of SUI, based on autologous cells, which is being tested in a phase II clinical study — a challenging development effort.