The Strategic Implementation Plan of the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP on AHA) proposed six Action Groups. After almost three years of activity, many achievements have been obtained through commitments or collaborative work of the Action Groups. However, they have often worked in silos and, consequently, synergies between Action Groups have been proposed to strengthen the triple win of the EIP on AHA. The paper presents the methodology and current status of the Task Force on EIP on AHA synergies. Synergies are in line with the Action Groups' new Renovated Action Plan (2016-2018) to ensure that their future objectives are coherent and fully connected. The outcomes and impact of synergies are using the Monitoring and Assessment Framework for the EIP on AHA (MAFEIP). Eight proposals for synergies have been approved by the Task Force: Five cross-cutting synergies which can be used for all current and future synergies as they consider overarching domains (appropriate polypharmacy, citizen empowerment, teaching and coaching on AHA, deployment of synergies to EU regions, Responsible Research and Innovation), and three cross-cutting synergies focussing on current Action Group activities (falls, frailty, integrated care and chronic respiratory diseases).

Abstract:In the last decade, the term Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has rapidly attracted the attention of policy-makers and researchers of Europe, mainly due to its promotion by the European Commission (EC). The concretion of this framework of RRI has been articulated by the EC around six key areas: governance, public engagement, gender equality, science education, open access, and open science and ethics. The indicators to measure these dimensions have been proposed recently. In our opinion the set of indicators available so far has two weaknesses: a lack of context-based indicators and a need for hierarchical ordering. Our aim is to provide tools for policy-and decision-makers that might need to identify the more important indicators in a specific context. In this work, we explored how the multicriteria analysis technique Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) can be used to prioritize indicators for RRI by involving experts in the specific context. The AHP method allowed weighting indicators according to experts in the different areas and producing four different options to select indicators. The method of AHP can be an appropriated instrument to select the most suitable indicators for RRI policies and initiatives.

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is a term used in Europe to advance in the consideration of societal and ethical dimensions of research and innovation. RRI involves two main challenges: its rationale its practical development. The legitimacy of RRI is based on its ethical foundation. Different ethical traditions, such as procedural ethics, have been identified as underpinning the RRI conceptualizations so far. The objective of this article is to examine the evolution of discursive ethics proposed by J. Habermas and K.O. Apel, and civic ethics as a normative framework for RRI, and to explore their development and feasibility and how they are affected by the tensions that such a paradigmatic change might imply.