Innovating for the Global South: Towards an Inclusive Innovation Agenda

Despite the vast wealth generated in the last half century, in today’s world inequality is worsening and poverty is becoming increasingly chronic. Hundreds of millions of people continue to live on less than $2 per day and lack basic human necessities such as nutritious food, shelter, clean water, primary health care, and education.

Innovating for the Global South offers fresh solutions for reducing poverty in the developing world. Highlighting the multidisciplinary expertise of the University of Toronto’s Global Innovation Group, leading experts from the fields of engineering, medicine, management, and global public policy examine the causes and consequences of endemic poverty and the challenges of mitigating its effects from the perspective of the world’s poorest of the poor.

Can we imagine ways to generate solar energy to run essential medical equipment in the countryside? Can we adapt information and communication technologies to provide up-to-the-minute agricultural market prices for remote farming villages? How do we create more inclusive innovation processes to hear the voices of those living in urban slums? Is it possible to reinvent a low-cost toilet that operates beyond the water and electricity grids?

Motivated by the imperatives of developing, delivering, and harnessing innovation in the developing world, Innovating for the Global South is essential reading for managers, practitioners, and scholars of development, business, and policy.

Dilip Soman is the Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Behavioural Science and Economics, a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and the director of Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman (BEAR) research centre.


Janice Gross Stein is the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.


Joseph Wong is Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Canada Research Chair in Democratization, Health, and Development in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto.