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26
2. Responsible Innovation and Responsible
Research and Innovation
Richard Owen and Mario Pansera
INTRODUCTION
‘Responsible Innovation’ (hereafter RI) and ‘Responsible Research and
Innovation’ (hereafter RRI) are two linked discourses that have emerged
in parallel over the last decade which challenge the epistemological norms
and practices concerning the production and valorisation of scientific
knowledge. This chapter will review and discuss the main features of these
discourses and how they are being framed in both policy and practice. Both
discourses ‘sediment over’ (Randles, 2017) and at times variously intersect
with, reinforce or challenge existing de facto narratives and norms of
responsibility1 as these relate to scientific research, development and inno-
vation (e.g. those relating to academic conduct and research integrity). In
the case of RI the discourse most certainly enlarges, reframes and chal-
lenges these extant responsibilities (Douglas, 2003). RRI is a policy-driven
discourse that emerged from the European Commission (EC) in the early
part of the current decade. At a high level it aims to foster the design of
inclusive and sustainable research and innovation, with an emphasis on
co-creation and co-production with society (‘science with and for society’).
In this sense it strives to align research and innovation to the values, needs
and expectations of society (with a strong emphasis on ‘societal grand
challenges’ (see Lund Declaration 2009;2 Rome Declaration 2014;3 and
Kuhlmann and Rip, 2014). It also seeks to anticipate and assess broader
implications of research and innovation in an ethical, inclusive and
responsive way. As we will discuss, in this regard RRI shares much with
the discourse of RI, which has in contrast emerged largely from academic
roots. Confined in the main to relations between science and society, RRI
strongly reflects its origins in the EC Science in Society programme (Owen
et al., 2012). As such it also more prosaically and instrumentally aims
to forward and mainstream action lines originating in that programme:
gender equality in research, open access to scientific results, ethics, public
engagement and the promoting of science education. These so-called ‘RRI
keys’ have become an increasingly predominant framing for the EC RRI
discourse over time, and a source of tension in the academic community.
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Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation 27
We will argue that, while individually important, the EC policy keys rep-
resent isolated themes rather than a coherent discourse. They also do not
substantively engage with innovation, or innovation systems, and seem to
offer only little prospects for systemic, transformational change of these.
Proponents of the discourse of RI seem to advocate deeper institutional
and systemic transformation in this respect, striving for innovation (and
science aimed at this) that is more anticipatory, more reflexive, more inclu-
sive, deliberative, open and, in total, more responsive. But RI remains
largely an ideal, a guiding principle that can be perceived as being abstract
and which remains unresolved in terms of its political, institutional and
normative imaginaries and practices. It, like RRI, has been largely preoc-
cupied with (techo-visionary) science and emerging technologies, rather
than innovation per se, and notably innovation involving the corporate
sector. Like RRI, its intersections with innovation systems remain little
explored and, associated with this, how roles and responsibilities of actors
should be (re)defined and how knowledge flows and institutions should
be (re)configured. Likewise, there has been little engagement of RI with
organisational studies and, associated with this, little consideration of
how ‘deep RI institutionalisation’ can be fostered (Randles, 2017). What
is clear is that RI is a discourse that is encountering significant challenges,
and indeed resistance, as it runs headlong into political imperatives
based largely on economic growth and productivity; vested interests; and
engrained institutional norms, cultures, behaviours and organisational
practices. After reviewing the main features of both discourses, we close
with some thoughts on these challenges.
THE EMERGING DISCOURSE OF RESPONSIBLE
INNOVATION
RI and RRI are often used interchangeably, and it is easy, but mistaken,
to consider them as being the same thing. While they have emerged in par-
allel and share some common features, we need from the outset to make a
clear distinction between these two discourses. We do this not through an
indulgent desire to labour the reader with semantics, but because of sig-
nificant differences that have emerged between them in recent years. The
EC RRI discourse in its early formulation certainly shared much with the
discourse of RI and vice versa (Owen et al., 2013; von Schomberg, 2012,
2013), and indeed vestiges of this earlier RRI formulation remain visible
today (see below). But in recent years these discourses have progressed
along increasingly divergent paths, and indeed these paths seem likely to
diverge even further in the future as the EC moves to a ‘3Os’ policy (‘open
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28 Handbook on science and public policy
science, open innovation, open to the world’).4 What they most certainly
share is their status as umbrella terms (Rip and Voß, 2013), as being
interpretively flexible, as being politically malleable and as being contested
discourses in the making.
The discourse of RI has strong academic roots. This is in contrast with
the distinctly EC policy roots associated with the RRI discourse which we
will go on to describe below. RI emerged at the beginning of the current
decade but has historical foundations that go back many decades, and
builds on discussions and debates concerning the social responsibility of
science that have an equally long history (Genus and Stirling, 2018). In
particular, such concepts (often emerging from science and technology
studies (STS)) as anticipatory governance (e.g. Barben et al., 2008), ELSI/
ELSA (ethical, legal and social aspects of technologies) and technology
assessment in its various forms (e.g. constructive and real time technology
assessment) are notable foundations. Unquestionably RI also has links to
concepts such as social innovation (Lubberink et al., 2017). Some authors
have argued that in processual terms RI may look decidedly familiar, even
that it is old wine in new bottles (Zwart et al., 2014). While we suggest this
to be a little harsh, these foundations certainly suggest an evolutionary
characteristic to RI and that it is a discourse that has not simply emerged
from nowhere (Genus and Stirling, 2018).
Those looking for clues in terms of a distinctive identity for RI can find
them in the term itself. RI should start with the word responsible and what
being responsible in the context of innovation means (Owen et al., 2013;
Stilgoe et al., 2013). The RI framework developed by these authors places
emphasis on an approach that is rooted in a future-oriented notion of
responsibility (Richardson, 1999; Pellizzoni, 2004; Grinbaum and Groves,
2013) emphasising dimensions of care and responsiveness (see Owen et al.
(2013, p. 35) for a more detailed discussion of this). This acknowledges
that innovation (and techno-visionary research leading to or aimed at this)
always sits in a historical context. But it is its power to create and trans-
form futures (reflecting what Jonas (1984) described as the ‘altered nature
of human action’ mediated through technology (and innovation)) that
requires a formulation of responsibility that goes ‘beyond the ethics of the
neighbourhood’ (ibid.) and is future oriented. Acknowledging the power
of innovation to create futures – and associated with these uncertainties
and vulnerabilities – RI asks how we can and should meaningfully engage
as a society with the futures innovation seeks to create, futures that are
being created unintentionally or by design. For example, how the future
world of work might be transformed by artificial intelligence and machine
learning, or how our future world might be transformed by techniques
intentionally aimed at engineering the climate at a planetary scale. But
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Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation 29
RI goes further, asking how we can build on this engagement to respond
and act in order for us to collectively take some measure of responsibility
for those futures, rather than discount them, or leave them to chance
and ourselves to moral luck. This makes RI as much about intended
impacts, visions, purposes, political agendas and associated public poli-
cies as it does about understanding and responding to emergence, given
the inevitable social, ethical, environmental and political entanglements,
dilemmas, uncertainties and risks science and innovation present. These
are uncertainties and entanglements we must expect to occur to varying
degrees but often lack the knowledge and foresight to accurately predict.
RI therefore firstly asks what kind of future we want innovation to
create, and secondly, given that the future is inherently uncertain and
unpredictable, how we should proceed under conditions of ignorance,
ambiguity and uncertainty. The second clue lies in the word innovation. It
is quite intriguing that much of the literature on RI and RRI to date has
focused on science and emerging technologies: it has paradoxically rather
neglected innovation, which we can describe as a socially constructed pro-
cess of knowledge mobilisation aimed at creating some sort of value (e.g.
through new products and services), often but not always within a market
ideology. Bessant (2013) describes innovation, which can be incremental
or disruptive, as ‘knowledge spaghetti’. This reminds us of the important
innovation-systems macro frame within which innovation often sits, sys-
tems which are rooted in knowledge creation, integration, development,
circulation and valorisation. Godin (Chapter 10 in this volume) notes that,
as science, technology and innovation have become coupled within such
systems, ‘technological innovation participates in the market ideology’.5
But of course, innovation systems can be configured in different ways and
for different normative ends. This is a point we will return to later in the
chapter, but for now we simply note the predominant market framing of
innovation, a framing that RI, through a commitment to second order
reflexivity,6 aims to interrogate.
Stilgoe et al. (2013) define RI as ‘taking care of the future through
collective stewardship of science and innovation in the present’. While this
implies that taking responsibility for the future necessitates some sort of
action in the present, it leaves rather a lot of missing detail in terms of what
‘collective stewardship’ involves (who, how and when). It also embeds
tensions and trade-offs, for example the balancing of stewardship with
the strongly-held value of scientific autonomy, or balancing precaution
and the risk of lost opportunities and benefits. Providing more detail
in terms of process, Stilgoe et al. go on to describe the need to develop,
integrate and embed competencies for anticipation, reflexivity, inclusive
deliberation and responsiveness in and around the policies, processes and
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30 Handbook on science and public policy
institutions of science, technology and innovation. This implies a strongly
inter- and trans-disciplinary approach as an adaptive, iterative, flexible and
proportionate process of co-creation, co-production and mutual learning
(Table 2.1).7 It also implies deficits to our current approach to stewardship
and governance of techno-visionary science and innovation. An approach
reliant on governance by the market underpinned by (often risk-based)
regulation – which is substantial in certain sectors (e.g. pharma ceu-
ticals)– certainly has strengths and limitations. Regulation for example,
while important, often lags behind innovation and is often de-limited to
health, safety, managing environmental risks and, in some cases, issues of
data privacy and security. RI also acknowledges the important but often
narrow focus that current institutional processes of ethical oversight pre-
sent and the lack of formal and systematic processes for engaging citizens
and stakeholders with the purposes, agendas and politics of potentially
disruptive science and innovation and their broader impacts on culture
and society. It acknowledges the well-known dilemma of control that
emerging technologies and innovation pose.8
Frameworks for RI in part reiterate the goals of earlier concepts such
as ELSA and (e.g. constructive) technology assessment to open up techno-
visionary science and innovation (Stirling, 2008) (e.g. to scrutiny, analysis,
reflection and broader debate). But RI also places a premium on respond-
ing, acting on broadly configured knowledge so we can make innovation
more accountable to society (Jasanoff, 2003), whether these are normative
and ethical decisions relating to what future (or near present) we think is
desirable, or keeping options open for future generations in the face of
uncertainty.
Sitting beneath the dimensions described in Table 2.1 are specific tools,
methods and techniques which support their translation into practice – for
example, in the areas of anticipation, where foresight methods are well
established; or in the reflexivity dimension, where experiments in so-
called mid-stream modulation (Fisher and Rip, 2013) have been useful;
or in the inclusive deliberation dimension, where there is a long history
of methodological development and deployment relating to public and
stakeholder engagement (see e.g. Sykes and Macnaghten, 2013); or in the
responsiveness dimension, where, for example, the configuration of clas-
sic innovation stage-gating mechanisms can be broadened (Owen et al.,
2013). A comprehensive review of these methods is beyond the scope of
this chapter. However, two observations can be made. First, frameworks
for RI emphasise integration and institutionalisation of these dimensions
as a continuous process of adaptive learning. In fact, it is rare to find
such integration and institutionalisation in practice. While RI invokes
an epistemology that is inter- and trans-disciplinary in nature, one that
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Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation 31
Table 2.1 Process dimensions of Responsible Innovation
Dimension Description Goals/Outcomes
Anticipation Articulating and reflecting
on potential intended and
unintended applications,
impacts and interactions.
Articulating plausible
outcomes, risks and
associated uncertainties.
Asking ‘what if?’ questions,
considering contingency,
what is known, what
is likely, plausible or
possible.
Searching for alternative
scenarios and options.
Critical engagement with visions
and promissory statements of
expected impacts.
Better understanding of socio-
technical and innovation
pathways and scenarios.
Better understanding of potential
impacts, risks and interactions.
Increasing resilience.
Better capacity and basis for
robust and legitimate decision
making.
Reflexivity
(1st order and
2nd order)
Reflecting on underlying
purposes, motivations,
values, what is known,
what is uncertain,
areas of ignorance,
assumptions, motivations,
commitments and ethical
dilemmas.
Reflecting on norms,
socio-political contexts,
agendas, institutional
practices, behaviours and
epistemologies.
Better understanding and
articulation of motivations and
purposes.
Articulation of tacit assumptions,
commitments, areas of
ignorance and uncertainties.
Critical and ethical engagement
with broader dimensions of
research and innovation.
Alignment with social values.
Better capacity and basis for
robust and legitimate decision
making.
Inclusive
deliberation
Opening up the visions,
purposes, processes and
emerging impacts of
science, technology and
innovation to inclusive
deliberation. Inviting,
engaging and deliberating
early and iteratively
with a diverse range
of stakeholders and
publics in research and
innovation agenda setting
and practice. Creating
more socially robust
Engaged stakeholders and
publics.
Raising debate.
Understanding of different
framings.
Identifying opportunities for
innovation.
Making visible assumptions,
commitments and intended
impacts.
Participation in agenda setting
and defining societal
challenges.
Equitable decision making.
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32 Handbook on science and public policy
invites multiple ways of knowing, this is an approach that presents distinct
challenges in its doing (see e.g. Felt et al., 2016). Second, there is the key
issue of how these methods are configured and deployed – for example,
how dialogue and deliberative exercises are framed, contextualised and
undertaken and with what motivations (see Sykes and Macnaghten (2013)
for a discussion of instrumental, normative and substantive motivations).
A number of initiatives and research programmes either formally
labelled as RI or containing RI components have emerged in the last five
years. In terms of public research funding organisations these include
the Dutch Research Council (NWO) RI programme (MVI), which has
an emphasis on ‘identifying ethical and societal aspects of technological
innovations – products and services – at an early stage, so that they can
be taken into account in the design process’. In the UK, the conceptual
Table 2.1 (continued)
Dimension Description Goals/Outcomes
knowledge and support
for legitimate decision
making. Inter- and trans-
disciplinarity aimed at
knowledge co-production.
Better capacity and basis for
robust and legitimate decision
making.
Openness Open and free access to and
communication of data,
results, purposes, risks,
uncertainties, applications
and implications to
facilitate inclusive
deliberation.
Transparency.
Equitable access to knowledge
and reducing information and
power asymmetries.
Supporting informed debate.
Better capacity and basis for
robust and legitimate decision
making.
Responsiveness Ensuring that broadly
configured anticipatory,
reflexive and deliberative
knowledge has bearing on
and shapes the purposes,
processes and impacts of
innovation and research
aimed at this.
Understanding and responding to
emergence.
Empowering social agency in
choices relating to innovation
and futures.
Keeping options open for future
generations.
Alignment with societal values.
Better capacity and basis for
robust and legitimate decision
making.
Source: adapted from Owen et al. (2013) and Stilgoe et al. (2013).
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Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation 33
development of RI went hand in hand with policy development at the UK
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the larg-
est public funder of physical sciences and engineering in the UK (Owen,
2014). The EPSRC has been the first, and to date the only, public research
funder in the UK to formally introduce a policy framework for RI (in
2013).9 Although the EPSRC labels the RI dimensions slightly differently
(Anticipate, Reflect, Engage, Act), the substance and meaning of these
terms are largely consistent with those described in Table 2.1. The EPSRC
frames RI around these as a ‘process that seeks to promote creativity and
opportunities for science and innovation that are socially desirable and
undertaken in the public interest’. It ‘acknowledges that innovation can
raise questions and dilemmas and is often ambiguous in terms of purposes
and motivations and unpredictable in terms of impacts, beneficial or
otherwise’. It seeks to ‘create spaces and processes to explore these aspects
of innovation in an open, inclusive and timely way’, stressing that ‘this is
a collective responsibility, where funders, researchers, stakeholders and
the public all have an important role to play’ and ‘which goes beyond
considerations of risk and regulation, important though these are’. The
policy commits the EPSRC to making RI prominent in its strategic think-
ing and funding plans, including proposal assessment. In practice, while
a growing number of its funding calls have signposted to the policy, RI
has largely been taken forward within a limited number of key thematic
areas, principally Information and Communications Technology (ICT),
Quantum Technologies, Synthetic Biology, Healthcare and its Centres
for Doctoral (PhD) Training. The impact on the EPSRC’s programme of
geoengineering research is one area where RI has had a notable impact
(Macnaghten and Owen, 2011; Owen, 2014 and references within).
Overall, in most countries, beyond a small number of research councils
(e.g. NWO, EPSRC, Research Council of Norway) RI has yet to formally
penetrate public policy to any substantial degree.
Despite its infancy, the discourse of RI has been subject to a growing
body of critique. Within this, a neglect to critically and normatively
engage with politics is perhaps one of the most significant criticisms. Van
Oudheusden (2014), writing about the ‘politics in and of deliberation’,
makes two relevant observations in this respect. He first cautions the
need for RI to be sensitive to power dynamics and strategic behaviour,
resisting the dangers of instrumentalisation (see also Genus and Stirling,
2018, p. 63). Others are well acquainted with such questions of framing,
motivation, power, legitimacy and institutional responsiveness, which
have historically been levelled at public engagement activities (e.g. Stirling,
2008; Sykes and Macnaghten, 2013). It is perhaps van Oudheusden’s
other observation that requires deeper consideration, one which relates to
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34 Handbook on science and public policy
questions of (democratic) accountability (Genus and Stirling, 2018). He
suggests that RI is politically biased in so far as it privileges a processual,
Rawls and Habermas-inspired deliberative concept of democracy (in
which there is a premium on deliberation, argumentation, procedural jus-
tice and mutual learning) over traditional expertise and representation–
that is, where some are authorised as accountable individuals to speak,
and make decisions, on our behalf. Partly the issue is one of effectiveness:
from a procedural point of view he notes that deliberative processes have
had mixed results in terms of their impacts on public policy. Glerup and
Horst (2014) similarly note that ‘several decades of work on deliberation
and public engagement [concerning science and technologies] suggest that
consensus . . . when under discussion by varied stakeholders, is at best dif-
ficult and at worst impossible’. It should of course be noted that consensus
is not the inevitable goal of RI.
This also relates to issues of legitimacy (input and throughput). RI, as
we have described above, not only advocates public participation and
deliberation in terms of understanding the unintended broader impacts
and interactions of innovation. It also focuses on intended impacts,
purposes and the formulation of science and innovation agendas, for
example the nature, configuration and substance of ‘grand challenges’.
In this respect, it advocates participatory agenda setting and the respond-
ing to inclusive, broadly configured and deliberative knowledge. But
in this schema what should the balance be between direct and indirect
democracy, between participation and representation? While RI can open
up debate and inform policy, political decisions regarding the setting of
science and innovation policy agendas, it could be argued, are best left
to elected, democratically accountable politicians.10 This is an issue that
remains unsettled in the RI literature to date. Von Schomberg (2012, 2013)
has, for example, on the one hand argued for a mutally responsive, delib-
erative approach (see below) but on the other also argued that the ‘right
impacts’ of science and innovation should, at least in a European context,
be grounded in the normative anchor points that exist within the European
Treaty, these being legitimate as they have been arrived at through the
mechanism of representative democracy.11
The critique of RI as being disconnected from politics links to the
critique of it being unclear in terms of its political ideology. How does
RI intersect with the predominant paradigm of the market economy
and extant relationships between it, research and innovation (e.g. as
innovation systems)? Does it seek to change these, and if so how? As
we and others have noted (e.g. Schot and Steinmueller, 2018; Godin,
Chapter 10 in this volume), innovation remains largely tied to a notion
of Schumpeterian competitive destruction (or what Etzkowitz and Zhou,
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Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation 35
Chapter 18 in this volume, refer to as ‘creative reconstruction’) in a
market economy frame that has progressively gathered pace since the
Second World War. It is the potential to commodify and valorise knowl-
edge through innovation to produce novel goods and services, creating
new markets, increasing market share and improving market competi-
tiveness and productivity that makes innovation particularly attractive
for governments (Whitley, Chapter 11 in this volume). It often also
provides the rationale for sustaining expenditure on R&D at national
and international scales (e.g. Horizon 2020 in the European Union). But
this framing for innovation presents problems and tensions for RI (and
vice versa). A key dimension for RI for example is openness and broad
inclusion to make visible and reduce information asymmetries during
the process of innovation (Table 2.1). But as Blok and Lemmens (2015)
have astutely observed, it is exactly those information asymmetries that
provide competitive advantage and on which innovation in a competitive
market economy thrives. A company may choose to aggressively protect
its intellectual property or selectively open up (e.g. through managed
open innovation), but only under strict terms, those being what is in the
company’s (and not necessarily society’s) interest. Concepts such as social
innovation offer a different lens, invoking a more open and socially-
motivated frame for innovation (Lubberink et al., 2017). Is RI then more
like social innovation and social enterprise? How distant is the innovation
in RI from innovation which is tightly coupled with the largely profit-
driven and market-engaged knowledge economy? We shall return to this
in the concluding parts of the chapter.
THE EMERGING DISCOURSE OF RESPONSIBLE
RESEARCH AND INNOVATION
Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), like RI, emerged as a
discourse at the beginning of the current decade. Unlike RI however, it
was from the outset a public policy discourse that emerged from within
the European Commission (EC). Owen et al. (2012) describe the origins of
the discourse, which we will briefly summarise here. Rene von Schomberg,
then at the EC Directorate General for Research, was instrumental in
initiating RRI as a policy discourse, which rapidly became adopted by
the EC’s Science in Society programme within the Research Directorate
at the time. Leaning on ethics and technology assessment traditions, von
Schomberg’s first significant RRI contribution (eventually published in
2012) was pivotal in setting out a vision and framing for RRI in its early
days. This vision and framing showed distinct similarities with the RI
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36 Handbook on science and public policy
discourse described above. This is clear for example when considering his
definition for RRI, which has become by far the most cited:
Responsible Research and Innovation is a transparent, interactive process by
which societal actors and innovators become mutually responsive to each other
with a view to the (ethical) acceptability, sustainability and societal desirability
of the innovation process and its marketable products (in order to allow a
proper embedding of scientific and technological advances in our society). (Von
Schomberg, 2012, p. 50)
Articulating an approach that is anticipatory, reflexive, deliberative,
inclusive, precautionary and with a strong emphasis on responsiveness,
he states:
The challenge is to arrive at a more responsive, adaptive and integrated
management of the innovation process. A multidisciplinary approach with
the involvement of stakeholders and other interested parties should lead to an
inclusive innovation process whereby technical innovators become responsive
to societal needs and societal actors become co-responsible for the innovation
process by a constructive input in terms of defining societal desirable products.
(Von Schomberg, 2012, p. 54)
In May 2011, the EC signalled its commitment to RRI and its intentions
to undertake a number of RRI related actions, including the funding
of a programme of research and coordination support actions within
the remaining period of the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) and into
Horizon 2020 and the establishment of an expert group on RRI. In 2012,
the then EU Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science Maire
Geoghegan-Quinn formally stated high-level EC policy support for RRI:
Researchers, policy makers, business people, innovators and most of all, the
general public, have difficult choices to make as regards how science and tech-
nology can help tackle our different societal challenges . . . we can only find the
right answers by involving as many stakeholders as possible in the research and
innovation process. Research and innovation must respond to the needs and
ambitions of society, reflect its values and be responsible . . . our duty as policy
makers [is] to shape a governance framework that encourages responsible
research and innovation. (Geoghegan-Quinn, 2012)
As the EC transitioned from the Framework Programme into Horizon
2020, RRI formally became a cross-cutting issue (Article 14, EC (2013))12
and funding for RRI projects from the Science in Society programme
(now rebranded as the ‘Science with and for Society Programme’) began in
earnest. The ambition to ‘mainstream RRI’ across the European Research
Area was reflected in the ‘Rome Declaration on RRI’ in 2014. Building
on the Lund Declaration (2009) it called on ‘European Institutions, EU
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Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation 37
Member States and their R&I funding and performing organisations,
business and civil society to make Responsible Research and Innovation
a central objective across all relevant policies and activities, including in
shaping the European Research Area and the Innovation Union’. In its
call for action, building capacity for RRI (including resources for RRI and
its integration into research and innovation programmes), the develop-
ment of RRI performance evaluation metrics and the implementation
of institutional changes that foster RRI (e.g. through creating spaces to
engage civil society actors, adapting curricula, developing training and
including RRI criteria in the evaluation and assessment of research staff)
were highlighted. As we will shortly discuss, these have met considerable
challenges in practice.
From the outset, framings of (and motivations for) RRI at the EC were
ambiguous and plural. However, as time went on it became increasingly
clear that von Schomberg’s original, more holistic vision would succumb
to RRI as a policy artefact crystallised specifically around five ‘keys’
(Table 2.2).
These keys reflected action lines and budget categories of the EC’s
Science in Society programme and had, it is important to note, been a
feature of the EC RRI discourse from the outset. But now they became a
dominant frame, gathering momentum during the phase of transition into
Horizon 2020 and being formalised in the Rome Declaration (2014; para.
3). RRI was a useful umbrella term to help reposition the action lines of
the Science in Society programme within the Horizon 2020 initiative. This
had a strong focus on innovation and grand societal challenges, an area
where involvement of the Science in Society programme had historically
been limited but now became a necessity if the transition was to be a
successful one. In this repositioning, these thematic keys would come to
provide much of the concrete substance for RRI in EC policy and the
content for many of the subsequent RRI projects that the EC funded.
In 2014 the EC appointed an expert group ‘to identify and propose
indicators and other effective means to monitor and assess the impacts of
RRI initiatives, and evaluate their performance in relation to general and
specific RRI objectives’.13 The group viewed RRI ‘from a network per-
spective, consisting of stakeholders jointly working on a set of principles
guided by the RRI keys’. While they extended RRI to considerations of
sustainability and social justice/inclusion ‘as more general policy goals’,
the main focus, as per the brief set out to them by the EC, was on the RRI
keys as described in Table 2.2. As the EC moved from concept to practice,
and to evidencing impact from its investment, projects were funded that
included monitoring of RRI almost exclusively in line with the EC RRI
keys. The broader, original vision for RRI, which as we have mentioned
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38 Handbook on science and public policy
Table 2.2 EC Responsible Research and Innovation ‘keys’
RRI ‘key’ Description
Comparison with RI
dimensions (Table 2.1)
Public
engagement
Promoting a scientifically literate society
able to actively participate in and support
democratic processes, and development
of science and technology. This includes
research and innovation policy agendas, in
particular the nature of societal challenges.
An emphasis on co-creation, mutual
understanding and iterative, inclusive and
participatory ‘multi-actor dialogues’.
Strong alignment with
inclusive deliberation
dimension.
Open
access/
Open
science
Making findings from publicly funded
research (data, peer-reviewed publications)
freely accessible without charge, to improve
knowledge circulation, foster innovation
and strengthen the knowledge economy.
Alignment with
openness dimension
but RI arguably has
less instrumental
motivations.
Gender
Encouraging girls to study science and
female students to further embrace a career
in research, fostering gender balance in
research teams, removing barriers that
generate discrimination against women in
scientific careers, ensuring gender balance
in decision making (e.g. in peer review and
advisory panels) and integrating the gender
dimension in research and innovation
content.
RI has no specific
gender dimension, but
advocates a broader
concept of inclusion.
Issues of gender and
diversity are however
useful entry points to
engage with RI.
Science
education
Making science (including education and
careers) more attractive to young people,
thereby increasing society’s appetite
for innovation, and opening up further
research and innovation activities. Strong
focus on promoting science, scientific
literacy and innovative pedagogies.
RI has no dimension
on science education,
but focuses on a
multi- and trans-
disciplinary approach
to epistemology and
pedagogy.
Ethics Applying established ethical principles and
legislation to research involving children,
patients, vulnerable populations; use of
human embryonic stem cells; privacy and
data protection issues; research on animals
and non-human primates. Also includes
established principles of research integrity
(data fabrication, falsification, plagiarism
or other research misconduct).
RI strongly advocates
reflection on ethical
issues. RI includes,
but goes beyond,
existing ethical
procedures.
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Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation 39
shared much with the discourse of RI, has retained some visibility at the
EC, which it continues to frame in headline terms as
an approach that anticipates and assesses potential implications and societal
expectations with regard to research and innovation, with the aim to foster the
design of inclusive and sustainable research and innovation . . . RRI implies
that societal actors . . . work together during the whole research and innovation
process in order to better align both the process and its outcomes with the
values, needs and expectations of society.14
However, in practice RRI has become framed by the EC ‘as a package
that includes multi-actor and public engagement in research and innova-
tion, enabling easier access to scientific results, the take up of gender and
ethics in the research and innovation content and process, and formal and
informal science education’. There has been considerable unease amongst
academics working on EC funded RRI projects concerning the reconcilia-
tion between this package of EC RRI keys and a more integrated, broader
vision. This has been handled by academics involved with RRI projects
in different ways: from attempts to position the keys as policy agendas
within a broader schema, to those who have completely ignored the EC
RRI keys, to those who have chosen to focus only on the keys and ignore
the broader vision.
RRI faces an uncertain future at the EC and, if it does persist, how it is
framed may well change again. It seems likely to become framed around
the ‘3 Os’ of ‘open innovation, open science, open to the world’, which
have a strong focus on digital technologies and innovation. Open innova-
tion is now envisaged as a quadruple helix which brings civil society into
the triple helix of government, industry and universities. Open science
meanwhile aims to transform science through ICT tools and networks,
making research more ‘open, global, collaborative, creative and closer to
society’. Open to the world finally advocates international cooperation in
research and innovation to remain relevant and competitive, to access the
latest knowledge and talent worldwide, tackle global societal challenges
more effectively and create business opportunities in new and emerging
markets.
FROM POLICY TO PRACTICE
In the last few years the focus for both RI and RRI has shifted, to varying
degrees, to one of ‘mainstreaming’ and embedding in institutional practice
(e.g. across the European Research Area for RRI). Emergent policies,
the funding of RRI projects by the EC and RI elements in programmes
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40 Handbook on science and public policy
funded by various research councils (such as the UK EPSRC and Dutch
Research Council) have resulted in the emergence of initiatives in some
European countries which have been formally badged as either RI or
RRI. The Research Council of Norway has for example made a significant
investment, notably within its Digital Life (Biotechnology) programme
that is configured along (and inspired by) the RI discourse, although inter-
estingly it is titled RRI,15 illustrating the interchangeable use of the terms.
Some eight years after the introduction of these terms, it seems reason-
able to ask to what extent have these discourses gained purchase? The
EC funded RRI-Practice project,16 which aims to understand the barriers
and drivers to the successful implementation of RRI, in 2017 undertook
a series of workshops across the globe involving some 200 stakeholders,
which have provided useful insights in this respect. Initial findings suggest
that despite being heuristically attractive, general awareness of RI and
RRI in many countries remains low. The terms are interpretively flexible,
with meanings sometimes based on intuition and personal experience,
and often in ways that accord with stakeholders’ perceived role responsi-
bilities, spheres of agency, contexts of action and world views. However,
despite this, many express a common view that RRI and RI should foster
openness and support scientific research and innovation oriented towards
societal needs and assessed along societal lines. Principles of inclusion, par-
ticipation and continuous, open dialogue frequently surface. Stakeholders
seem conscious however of the potential tensions such an inclusive and
open approach poses for extant norms of scientific autonomy, which
often imply a division of labour between undertaking science on the one
hand and reflecting, anticipating and deliberating on societal dimensions
and impacts on the other. These emergent discourses may be perceived
as posing a threat to these norms and role responsibilities and adding
unnecessarily to these as a burden that may hamper creativity, progress
and innovation.
Stakeholders are often able to identify many existing policies and activi-
ties that they consider as being related to RRI if this is framed around
the EC RRI keys, and which allow them to claim they are already ‘doing
RRI’. These might include formal policies on gender equality in research
and higher education, codes of ethics, policies on open access or those
promoting science literacy, education and communication. The discourses
may already be becoming synonymous to some researchers with ad hoc
public engagement, risk analysis, research integrity and existing codes of
research ethics, that is, existing de facto responsibility norms. Drawing on
a study undertaken in a UK university, Hartley et al. (2017) concluded
that such a narrow framing (e.g. RI or RRI as science communication or
public outreach) risks closing down the political dimensions of research,
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Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation 41
ensuring this remains a site of what they describe as ‘non-politics’. Such
limited ranges of imagination risk becoming adopted, institutionalised
and habituated, with a temptation to position RRI as ‘business as usual’.
Goos and Lindner (2015) in this regard describe the dynamics of RRI at
the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Europe’s largest organisation for applied
research, where the ‘Changing Cultures’ unit was renamed an RRI unit in
2013,17 partly due to soft intervention measures instigated by the German
Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The authors contend that in
fact very little has changed in terms of the work of the unit, which focuses
on methods of participatory foresight and fostering technology transfer.
They assert that ‘participatory processes conducted by the RRI unit . . .
can be characterised as an occasional supplement to the everyday work of
Fraunhofer scientists and engineers’.
These authors suggest that this in part reflects the context of RRI
institutionalisation. The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is an applied science
organisation with strong industry relations that is strongly conditioned
by the need to acquire third-party funding. Embedded in neo-corporatist
type institutional arrangements, ‘societal benefit is still largely viewed as
technological benefit which, in turn, is understood to be synonymous with
market uptake’ (Goos and Lindner, 2015). This resonates with findings
from the RRI-Practice workshops where the context of institutionalisa-
tion was also often discussed, and where the external political context was
highlighted as being an important macro frame for RRI or RI.18 In China
for example, stakeholders suggest that an important context is national
competitiveness and innovation undertaken in the national interest, while
in the UK, the imperative for economic growth and productivity is viewed
as being a significant contemporary macro frame. In contrast, in Norway
the Nordic model of tripartite cooperation is seen as paving the way for
closer dialogue between research, society, politics and innovation: here
social democratic traditions of dialogue, trust and cooperation are more
firmly rooted. Likewise, in the Netherlands, a more deliberative tradition
and higher-trust society are perceived as providing fertile ground for
these discourses. However, these external political contexts cannot be
assumed, vary geographically and are often nuanced. So, while the first
responsibility for innovation in China might be promoting economic and
social development, understanding of social risks and the consequences
of science, technology and innovation are also seen as being increasingly
important: China may in this respect be entering into reflexive modernity.
Both RI and RRI face significant institutional barriers and logics that
are framed by this external context. If for example they challenge deeply
engrained institutional and disciplinary cultures, norms, behaviours and
governance arrangements (e.g. norms of scientific autonomy) they can
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42 Handbook on science and public policy
encounter deep resistance and be seen as an obstacle. However, this
perception varies considerably across countries, institutions and career
levels. And while there has without doubt been resistance in some universi-
ties, in others these discourses are viewed as being central to the DNA of
the institution and even a source of competitive advantage. What seems
clear is that, by and large, current disciplinary and institutional expec-
tations of researchers, incentives, rewards and progression/promotion
criteria pose significant barriers. The institutional challenges for inter- and
trans-disciplinary research are well known (e.g. Felt et al., 2016). RI in
particular challenges existing approaches to epistemology, definitions of
how research excellence and quality are defined19 and in turn how these
are evaluated and rewarded. Overall, the workshops suggest competence
and capacity for RI is lacking, exacerbated by a lack of education, training
and resources at institutional levels. Stakeholders recognise the need for
committed and effective leadership, but it is not clear who has agency, and
at what level. Where RI initiatives have had some success, this has been the
result of committed individuals who have been effective change agents and
champions; conversely, when such individuals quit or move to different
roles these initiatives can quite quickly collapse.
THE CHALLENGES OF INSTITUTIONALISATION
AND TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE
In this chapter we have discussed Responsible Innovation and Responsible
Research and Innovation as two significant discourses emerging in science
and public policy over the last decade. Both are fragile and contested
discourses. Both advocate the notion of shared responsibilities for the
development and consequences of techno-visionary science and innova-
tion, fostering collective responsibility, for example through continuous
embedding of public and stakeholder engagement (Ribeiro et al., 2017). RI
in particular builds on a history of STS and shares with it a critical stance
regarding the relationships and dynamics between science, innovation,
politics and society. It is RI’s second order reflections on not just science
and technology but innovation and innovation systems that prompt and
invite a more critical discussion on the notion of innovation itself in the
21st century and, associated with this, interrogation as to how innovation
systems are configured and for what purpose. This we suggest is the first of
three major research gaps, all of which are deeply linked and each of which
cannot be viewed in isolation. To date, there has been very little research
or scholarship at the intersection of RI and innovation systems (whether this
is national, regional, technological or sectoral innovation systems). How
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Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation 43
RI intersects with and challenges such concepts as the triple helix and its
central construct of the entrepreneurial university, or aligns with concepts
such as the quadruple helix and its desire to embed civil society as a fourth
strand remains little explored.20 How RI aligns with such institutional
constructs as the civic university (Goddard et al., 2016), grounded as this
is in active stakeholder and community engagement and having a sense
of purpose (‘not just what a university is good at but good for’ (ibid.)) is
unclear. How the structures and functions of innovation systems (Hekkert
and Negro, 2009) could (and should) be reconfigured and to what norma-
tive ends likewise remains unexamined. The concept of the responsible
innovation system is we suggest an important avenue for future research.
Such reconfiguration we suggest is critically important. As Genus
and Stirling (2018) note, ‘innovation is whatever happens to emerge
from incumbent structures of interest, privilege and power in prevailing
innovation systems’. And innovation systems continue to be, by and large,
configured to provide an ever-increasing supply of innovative products,
services and business models for the market, to stimulate markets, to create
new markets and to protect and increase market share. That is not to say
that innovation (and in particular social innovation) does not produce
benefits for society. But, we suggest, innovation overwhelmingly remains
intimately and unreflexively tied to the idea of gaining competitive advan-
tage within the construct of the market society, while being insufficiently
directed at the deepening problems facing society and our planet, which
include a rapidly escalating crisis of climate change and ecological sustain-
ability, demographic change, inequality, geopolitical conflict and resource
sustainability and insecurity. Indeed, innovation can exacerbate such
problems. This we argue is the banality of innovation. Discourses of RRI
and RI, particularly with their focus on innovation aimed at societal grand
challenges, strongly suggest an ambition to collectively direct innovation
towards a future that is sustainable, equitable, just, flourishing and good.
Not only that, but they make this a responsibility imperative. But in doing
so they need to confront the banality of innovation, reframing innovation
and reconfiguring innovation systems (Schot and Steinmueller, 2018).
This leads us to the second research gap, which relates to RI’s (and
RRI’s) political and ideological imaginary, which as we have already
discussed requires far greater interrogation and articulation. We have
discussed this earlier in the chapter, and we need only note here that any
consideration of the transition to a responsible innovation system cannot
be divorced from a consideration of its political and ideological imaginar-
ies, visions and assumptions: these need to be opened up for scrutiny and
explored in far greater detail. The third research gap, which also connects
to innovation systems, relates to how RI can become institutionalised in
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44 Handbook on science and public policy
practice: what Randles (2017) describes as the challenge of ‘deep institu-
tionalisation’. In describing the nature and phases of deep institutionalisa-
tion, Randles (arguably for the first time in the context of RI/RRI) draws
attention to the literature on legitimacy construction (and its importance
for the formation of new institutions) and the dynamics of organisational
change. This is a literature which emphasises the importance of ‘shifting
external institutional contexts [i.e. the rules, norms and ideologies of wider
society] producing both pressures and opportunities to which organisa-
tions variously contribute and respond’ (ibid., italics in original). It is
during moments of crisis or instability in this external institutional context
that legitimacy questions and struggles can arise, prompting ‘(de)institu-
tionalisation processes where the status quo and its attendant logics . . . are
called into question’ (ibid., italics in original) (see also Oliver, 1992).21 But,
as Randles goes on to explain, such challenge in itself does not necessarily
lead to institutional change, that is, whereby a value system is not only
articulated through visions but becomes routinely performed in practice.
She notes that incumbents can buttress their position and that challengers
need to be effective institutional entrepreneurs and change agents in order
to build and sustain an alternative vision and narrative, supported by a
culture of pluralism that enables and encourages such entrepreneurs. The
challenges and barriers to RI /RRI described in the preceding section sug-
gest both a buttressing of positions by incumbents and a need for effective
institutional entrepreneurs to build and sustain a RI narrative.
Randles further explains that in order for a discourse such as RI to
become institutionalised there also needs to be a process of de-institu-
tionalisation of the incumbent tradition (or prior-institutionalised form),
through processes of assimilation, dilution, disembedding, competition
and erasure (Dacin and Dacin, 2007). Arguably, we have witnessed some
institutional assimilation (i.e. absorption of RI elements into existing
traditions such as those found in universities) and some dilution (i.e.
enlarging and adding complexity to existing institutional practices). In
a number of cases we have witnessed, as a result, both ‘responsibility-
overload’ (‘as new imperatives of responsibility are loaded onto organisa-
tions by external pressures whilst the original logics and corresponding
obligations remain’ (ibid.)) and tactical responses that have presented as
‘responsibility-washing’ (e.g. de-coupled ‘RRI units’ which leave ‘the rest
of the organisation intact and performing according to earlier institutional
logics’ (see our earlier observations concerning Fraunhofer)). Overall it is
hard to conclude that, with only some exceptions, there has been substan-
tive disembedding (i.e. the compromising and dismantling of incumbent
institutional logics), competition or transformational change (noting
Dacin and Dacin’s observation that erasure rarely occurs; rather, there
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Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation 45
is a phenomenon of ‘sedimenting over’ of new narratives over old ones,
elements of which persist).
What these three research challenges have in common is a desire to
maintain a level of transformative ambition and systemic focus. A vision
based around RRI framed as a package of individual EC keys might foster
more scientifically literate and engaged citizens, in part helped by better
access to scientific results, better gender balance in science and a more
systematic institutional embedding of codes of conduct for ethics and
research integrity. These are important. However, we contend that this
basket of policy agendas risks a narrow interpretation of what, in the con-
text of innovation, being responsible is and how we critically engage with
innovation in a way that allows us to take responsibility for our future.
Not only that, but this may, unwittingly or through conscious choice, in
fact support and reinforce the status quo. The discourses of Responsible
Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation cannot shirk
these questions of deep institutionalisation, transformation and systemic
change. Maintaining this ambition is, we suggest, imperative.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was in part undertaken within the RRI-Practice project,
funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation
Programme, grant no. 709637. We thank Ellen-Marie Forsberg for helpful
comments on an earlier draft of the chapter.
NOTES
1. Randles (2017) describes ‘de-facto rri’ as ‘what actors already do, in collective fora, in
order to embed institutionalised interpretations of what it means to be responsible into the
practices, processes, organisational structures and outcomes of research and innovation’.
2. http://www.vr.se/download/18.7dac901212646d84fd38000336/ – accessed 5 Jan 2018.
3. https://ec.europa.eu/research/swafs/pdf/rome_declaration_RRI_final_21_November.pdf
– accessed 5 Jan 2018.
4. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/open-innovation-open-science-open-
world-vision-europe – accessed 22 Jan 2019.
5. See also Schot and Steinmueller (2018) who describe two macro frames for innovation
since the Second World War, with a transition from linear models of innovation to
innovation systems.
6. In its second order formulation, reflexivity considers how ‘society, and modern ration-
ality in particular, work, . . . not only a reflection on our own actions . . . but a reflection
on how the presupposition, the governance principles and the values determine our way
of acting’ (GREAT, 2014, pp. 73–76).
7. With, as Kuhlmann and Rip (2014) suggest, a ‘focus on system-oriented strategic
interventions, tentative and experimental in design.’
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46 Handbook on science and public policy
8. At the earlier stages of an innovation there is most opportunity to adapt and control
innovation, with fewer costs and less resistance from vested interests, but at these
early stages there is often little or no evidence of wider (undesirable) impacts to
make the case for doing so; conversely, by the time we have procured knowledge that
leads to a better understanding of the impacts of an innovation, it may be ‘locked
in’ to society and both costs and vested interests may be so significant we may have
little ability to do much about it. Genus and Stirling (2018) provide a more detailed
account of this and other contributions relevant to RI/RRI originally made by David
Collingridge.
9. https://epsrc.ukri.org/index.cfm/research/framework/ – accessed 22 Jan 2019.
10. We need to note here that there are many unaccountable individuals who have a
powerful say in this regard, from influential scientists (‘Grey Gods’) to philanthropists
directly funding research and innovation with little to no democratic accountability
(Fejerskov, 2017).
11. See also an interesting discussion on the concept of ‘knowledge parliaments’ in
Kuhlmann and Rip (2014, p. 8).
12. COM(2013)0624 20.12.2013 Official Journal of the European Union L 347/121 (1).
13. http://ec.europa.eu/research/swafs/pdf/pub_rri/rri_indicators_final_version.pdf – ac-
cessed 22 Jan 2019.
14. https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/responsible-research-
innovation – accessed 5 Jan 2018.
15. www.forskningsradet.no/prognett-biotek2021/Ansvarlig_forskning_og_innovasjon_RR
I/1254026368408 – accessed 5 Jan 2018.
16. www.rri-practice.eu – accessed 5 Jan 2018.
17. www.cerri.iao.fraunhofer.de/en.html – accessed in January 2018.
18. Randles (2017) discusses the issue of ‘vertical alignment’ in more detail.
19. Interestingly, a key observation made in a 2015 report to the UK Higher Education
and Funding Council for England by King’s College London was that ‘Staff within
high-performing research units display a distinct ethos of social and ethical values’,
suggesting in fact a strong link between excellence and social and ethical values.
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/HEFCE,2014/Content/Pubs/Independentresearch/2015/
Characteristics,of,high-performing,research,units/2015_highperform.pdf (Observation
D) – accessed 3 May 2018.
20. See the EU FoTRRIS project for an example of an initiative that draws inspiration
from the quadruple helix in its work on RRI (http://fotrris-h2020.eu/).
21. The SPICE project (Stilgoe et al., 2013) was the location for one such moment, but one
can think of others in which technologies have been implicated, from GM to complex
financial instruments and their role in the 2007–2008 financial crash to the data scandal
involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Likewise, it is interesting to speculate
whether the emergence of RRI within the EU Science and Society programme at least in
part resulted from a similar moment of external uncertainty prompted by the transition
from FP7 into Horizon 2020.
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