Innovation at extreme institutional distance: Bricolage theory and grassroots ingenuity in rural India's informal economy

Despite extensive research on innovation in resource-rich environments, limited theoretical attention has been devoted to understanding how necessity-driven innovation emerges and persists in informal economies. This study addresses a critical gap in bricolage theory by examining how core mechanisms—creative resource recombination under constraint—operate in contexts of extreme resource scarcity, where innovators are structurally distant from formal institutional support, which, when it arrives at all, does so through sporadic, peripheral, and often serendipitous channels rather than standing scaffolding. Drawing on in-depth case studies of four grassroots innovators in rural India, we find that bricolage in informal settings is fundamentally shaped by empathy-driven problem identification and agency-dependent persistence, diverging from utilitarian, market-oriented innovation models. Rural India constitutes an especially significant context for this inquiry, given that over 93% of its workforce operates in the informal economy, creating compound conditions of resource scarcity and institutional distance that intensify bricolage dynamics beyond those observed in prior studies. Our analysis reveals three theoretical extensions: (1) empathy transforms bricolage from a neutral toolkit into a socially embedded process that prioritizes community welfare over scalability, creating an innovation–commercialization paradox—a mechanism we distinguish from, though related to, social bricolage and compassion-driven venturing; (2) individual agency substitutes for absent systemic resources through personal sacrifice, exposing the fragility of self-reliant bricolage, illustrated most sharply by one case that we analyze explicitly as a deviant, unresolved instance; and (3) serendipitous external support enables critical resource recombination but remains too sporadic to sustain scalability. These findings extend prior work on crisis-driven bricolage and informal sector transitions by demonstrating that extreme scarcity introduces empathy and precarious agency as mechanisms absent from existing typologies. We propose “assisted bricolage” as a formally defined theoretical construct, complete with scope conditions and testable propositions, and derive concrete policy interventions to systematically amplify grassroots ingenuity.