Responsible innovation: a going concern

With this second issue, the Journal of Responsible Innovation (JRI) is now a “going concern” as they say, demonstrably not a one-off. Inquiries abound. Manuscripts arrive over the electronic transom. And “responsible research and innovation” continues to be a timely and important topic at the interface of scholarship and practice.

In the USA, for example, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues recently released its report, Gray Matters (PCSBI 2014), which discusses in detail the options for pursuing responsible neuroscience in the context of President Barack Obama's BRAIN Initiative. The focus of the report is “integrative approaches for neuroscience, ethics and society”, and it borrows heavily from JRI's own associate editor, and my Arizona State University colleague, Erik Fisher's testimony and work in Socio-Technical Integration Research (PCSBI 2014, 15 and see Shuurbiers and Fisher 2009). Indeed, three of the Commission's four recommendations focus on integrating ethical and societal perspectives with neuroscience – “early and explicitly throughout the research” as well as in education and in advisory bodies – and the fourth focuses on evaluating integration techniques.

In the UK, SynbiCITE (www.synbicite.com) – the Synthetic Biology Innovation Commercial and Industrial Translation Engine – has committed to an approach including responsible innovation (RI). Based at Imperial College and comprising 15 academic and 11 industrial partners, SynbiCITE aims “to grow UK industry in the sector and improve synthetic biology, using industry to achieve significant economic impact, generate wealth for the companies, generate skilled workers and create jobs”.¹ It has also adopted as its approach to RI the four-part framework – anticipate, reflect, engage and act – proffered by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and described by Owen (2014) in JRI's first issue.

Meanwhile, on the continent, the constructive conference scene for RI continues. The Dutch “Responsible Innovation Conference 2014” was held in The Hague in May, and the International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation (www.ice-conference.org) – with the support of the IEEE Technology Management Council – conducted its meeting on “Engineering Responsible Innovation in Products and Services” in Bergamo, Italy, in June as JRI was going to press. Conference activities have also spread to the global South, as Macnaghten et al. (2014) report in the Perspectives section on a meeting in Brazil.

The second issue of JRI joins the fray with many features shared with the first issue, and it introduces different pleasures as well. In the lead research article, authors Colette Bos, Bart Walhout, Alexander Peine and Harro van Lente (Bos et al. 2014), explore a major challenge to RI, namely, its role in steering research given its ideographic nature. Studying this question not just with respect to RI but also to “sustainability” and “valorization” in a Dutch research program on nanotechnology, Bos and co-authors find that such terms do have forceful normative connotations and contribute to the structuring of research projects and programs. Talk matters.

Whereas Bos and colleagues focus on the language and structure of research programs to encourage RI, the second research article by Blok (2014) addresses the role of stakeholder dialogue. Blok draws on a variety of theorists first to problematize dialogue as reliant on unachievable measures of openness, alignment and harmony, and second, to propose a concept of stakeholder dialogue more comfortable with differing interests and value frames. Blok's theorizing leaves him with the opportunity to articulate a vision for stakeholder dialogue that is more attuned to reflexiveness and responsiveness and, thus, for RI.

While there is no Discussion Paper in the current issue, as in the first issue, we present a number of perspectives that present views of the field and its challenges briefer but still empirically or conceptually rigorous approaches to issues, and other more pointed pieces. Here, Phil Macnaghten and numerous participants map out some “tensions, paradoxes and possibilities” surfaced at their meeting on RI at the University of Campinas, Brazil, in March 2014. The meeting, and this essay (Macnaghten et al. 2014), articulate some of the challenges to the RI agenda from a comparative North-South perspective, for example, the lesser relevance of RI's attention to emerging technologies in Brazil, and a relative lack of attention to the power relations and political economy of RI that is important in the developing world (but also see van Oudheusden 2014).

In an attempt, perhaps, to make RI and sustainable development a shade less ideographic, Ben Wender and colleagues advocate for the development of anticipatory Life-Cycle Assessment as a tool to support environmentally sensitive RI. Importantly, Wender et al. (2014) argue that not only researchers from multiple disciplinary perspectives might take advantage of such a tool, but also that research sponsors might use it to explore potential investment strategies – taking seriously the anticipatory perspective of thinking about the future but acting in the present.

Perhaps no professionals act in the present while thinking about the future than physicians and, particularly, surgeons who have to cut in order to cure. Hodges and Angelos offer in their perspective a proposal to make surgical innovations more responsible by creating a secure, anonymous, online registry of surgical innovations in which surgeons could exchange information about innovations across institutional boundaries and without fear of liability or other exposure (2014). A small survey of surgical faculty, fellows and residents at a university hospital provides a plausibility check that such a registry might well be accepted and used by surgeons in the USA.

The final perspective, from Jathan Sadowski, is intended to be a wake-up call for social scientists and ethicists to attend to the rapid development of robotic exoskeletons – pioneered largely for military purposes – for their use in civilian, and particularly disability, contexts. After providing a brief overview of exoskeleton technology, Sadowski (2014) examines the ethics and politics of exoskeletons, concluding that while they are likely to improve the quality of life for many, they will likely do so while reinforcing restrictive stereotypes of what it means to be able-bodied in contemporary society. This call resonates with the review of the documentary film Fixed from the journal's first issue (de Saille 2014).

The two reviews in the current issue cover more traditional media – book publications – but Lantz Fleming Miller's review of Better Humans? Understanding the Enhancement Project, by Michael Hauskeller, addresses the enhancement controversy by tackling a core question of just what it is that we might mean by “better” when we talk about enhancement technologies making humans better. In Miller's (2014) view, Hauskeller neatly unwraps some paradoxes underlying the pro-enhancement perspective, revealing the self-contradiction in believing that we humans – so flawed that we must be enhanced and transcended – can also come up with not just the technology but also the rules – to do it properly.

Jeffrey Holbrook's review of the multi-authored Early Engagement and New Technologies: Opening Up the Laboratory, edited by Neelke Doorn, Daan Schuurbiers, Ibo van de Poel, and Michael E. Gorman, is in a sense about the combination of technology and rules that we manage to create. Holbrook (2014) describes the five different approaches to early ethical and societal engagement with new and emerging technologies that Doorn and colleagues have featured and commented on. While these approaches will be largely familiar to JRI's core audience, the editors' framing enhances our understanding by offering a set of questions held in common among the approaches, and Holbrook wonders if other methods, including more quantitative approaches, might bolster each.

Finally, the current issue introduces JRI's Pedagogy section. In it, Mary E. Sunderland, Behnam Taebi, Cathryn Carson and William Kastenberg report on a pilot, co-curricular project in graduate-level engineering ethics. The project brought together engineering students from the University of California, Berkeley and philosophy of technology students from Delft University of Technology in an intensive summer experience that hoped to engage their emotions to build new collaborative opportunities in engineering ethics. In addition to the account of the program by Sunderland et al. (2014), several of the students from both the engineering and ethics sides have also contributed their thoughts on it.

Notes

1. See www.synbicite.com (accessed June 17, 2014).