The framing of innovation among European research funding actors: Assessing the potential for ‘responsible research and innovation’ in the food and health domain

Abstract

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has recently emerged as a new framework for science and technology governance. The concept articulates the need for mutual exchange by which societal actors become responsive to each other early on in the process of innovation, with a view to facilitate ethically acceptable and sustainable innovation. There is relatively limited evidence to explore the extent to which the process of research and innovation under the terms of RRI is realised in practice, particularly in the context of food and health research. Although research to date has been examining innovation from the point of view of inputs and outputs—R&D funding and patents—we propose to examine the cognitive framing of innovation that shapes decisions of those who constitute a part of the innovation chain.\ud This paper explores how the concept of innovation is understood and used in policy implementation, with a particular focus upon ‘food and health’ science and research policy and funding. Our analysis is based on 55 interviews of various actors engaged in research funding decision-making across eight European countries. Three themes emerged from the analysis: concept of innovation; conditions for innovation; and drivers of innovation; through these themes, the cognitive framing was drawn out. The cognitive framing suggests that innovation in the food and health domain is perceived to be focused on biosciences and marketable applications to the neglect of social sciences and broader public interest; that the ‘‘innovation network” is primarily viewed as centred around scientific/technical and industrial actors; and that the demand-pull dynamic is relevant to innovation in the area of food and health, despite having been relegated in contemporary thinking and policies around innovation. These findings point to the inadequate consideration of the normative issues — how problems are to be defined and addressed — among national research funders in the food and health domain, and indicate a gap between the ideas of innovation under the terms of RRI and innovation as conceptualised by those involved in its\ud governance

Implementing Responsible Research and Innovation Practices in SMEs: Insights into Drivers and Barriers from the Austrian Medical Device Sector

“…This supports previous observations that SMEs are still largely unaware of RRI [7][8][9]18,20,21]. When the different elements of the concept (see Section 2) were explained to them, however, they had no difficulties in relating them to their company activities and in discussing potential enabling and obstructing factors.…”

“…At this point in time, evidence of how RRI should be put into practice is still limited [18,20,21]. So far, RRI has been "developed and introduced in a top-down manner by policy makers and scientists" [8] (p. 3) and not yet been translated into practices that are compatible with corporate research and innovation objectives, processes and underlying rationales.…”

“…More recent studies have aimed to shed light on the implementation of responsible innovation practices in businesses. These studies indicate that businesses in Europe still seem to be operating without an awareness of the RRI concept [18,20,21], but that extant practices, processes and purposes exhibit indications of responsible innovation [23]. Moreover, a growing body of literature has been dealing with questions of how to incentivize or drive companies to adopt the concept [7,10,24] or particular RRI principles [25,26].…”

“…The multi-impulse model [31,32] is another explanatory approach of factors "pushing" or "pulling" innovation towards sustainability. This is based on Schumpeter's model of creative response [21] which outlines innovation as a result of the creative performance of actors under specific framework conditions, in which a combination of factors exert influence on the innovation process. It illustrates company-internal (company vision, key individuals) and company-external influences (technological developments, market demand, regulation, civil society) on an innovation process.…”

Risk analysis and technology assessment in support of technology development: Putting responsible innovation in practice in a case study for nanotechnology

“…There is much policy attention to responsible innovation, and research funding has been allocated to this theme. However, there are not many large programs on emerging technologies where this is really been integrated (Khan et al ).…”