Learning to do responsible innovation in industry: six lessons

Abstract

There is now almost a decade of experience with RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation), including a growing emphasis on RRI in industry. Based on our experiences in the EU-funded project PRISMA, we find that the companies we engaged could be motivated to do RRI, but often only after we first shifted initial assumptions and strategies. Accordingly, we formulate six lessons we learned in the expectation that they will be relevant both for RRI in industry as well as for the future of RRI more broadly. These lessons are: (1) Strategize for stakeholder engagement; (2) Broaden current assessments; (3) Place values center stage; (4) Experiment for responsiveness; (5) Monitor RRI progress; and (6) Aim for shared value.

Responsible innovation, anticipation and responsiveness: case studies of algorithms in decision support in justice and security, and an exploration of potential, unintended, undesirable, higher-order effects

“…To some extent, such high-order, unintended, undesirable consequences can be anticipated, e.g., by exploring possible future scenarios [31,34]. Anticipation, however, remains notoriously difficult [43]. In addition, one can move to responsiveness, 'a capacity to change shape or direction in response to stakeholder and public values and changing circumstances' [40], p. 1572.…”

Closing out twenty-twenty on a positive note

“…A growing area of observational, conceptual and engaged research pertaining to industrial contexts include, in this issue, articles that propose responsible approaches to the digitalization of biological populations and ecosystems (Bruynseels 2020), revisit the desirability of 'opening up' in industrial innovation initiatives in agriculture (Van Mierlo, Beers, and Hoes 2020), assess understandings of societal engagement in Dutch technology organization (Steen and Nauta 2020), and offer lessons learned from a coordinated series of scholarly engagements with eight European companies (van de Poel et al 2020).…”

“…Scholarly discourses, conceptualizations and methodological practices comprise their own thematic subject matter in JRI and such articles here promote the integration of inclusiveness and epistemic injustice considerations in scholarly discourses (Koch 2020), elucidate scholarly understandings of emotions in technology (Steinert and Roeser 2020), review responsible innovation concepts in school design (Deppeler and Aikens 2020), develop and test integrative methods pertaining to social labs (Timmermans et al 2020) and professional health science practice (Lehoux et al 2020), and offer scholarly perspectives and declarations regarding responsible onlineification of research (Braun et al 2020), US federal regulation of biologics (Hemphill 2020) and RRI in the European research and innovation policy landscape itself (Gerber 2020).…”

Responsible Innovation in Business: Perceptions, Evaluation Practices and Lessons Learnt

“…Policy-makers and social scientists have introduced the concept of responsible research and innovation (RRI) to counter this and encourage innovation that is ethically acceptable and socially desirable [2]. Since the vast majority of research and innovation is funded and produced by industry, a growing body of research focuses on the implementation of RI in industry [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Nevertheless, companies tend to have virtually no awareness or recognition of this concept [7,11].…”