Giving content to responsible innovation

Like many of the readers of and contributors to the Journal of Responsible Innovation, perhaps, I have been busy in the last few weeks working with colleagues to complete proposals for the Horizon 2020 program involving responsible research and innovation (RRI). While it has at times been a challenge to keep up with the staccato pace of international collaborations, it has also been intriguing and even exciting to see how the culturally and geographically diverse parts of this community might be coming together through European-sponsored research. Regardless of how the proposals that I and colleagues might be part of perform in the competition, as the editor of JRI, my heart warms at the prospect of so much new, high-quality, sponsored research that must be published.

In the USA, I am involved in a similar activity, but it is framed somewhat differently. The USA has no RRI program as such, but various aspects of what could be called RRI are incorporated into the funding of specific techno-scientific programs, for example, as ethical, legal, and social implications funding was included in the Human Genome Initiative, and as social and ethical implications research has been included as part of the “responsible development” portion of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. In particular, with colleagues Richard Murray at Caltech and Jennifer Brian at ASU, I have been organizing a workshop sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) on setting agendas for societal research in synthetic biology.

Among other notable aspects of the workshop is that three different directorates within NSF are sponsoring it – biology, engineering, and the social, behavioral, and economic sciences. With biology in the lead, this partnership is somewhat reminiscent of the lead in RRI taken in the UK by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The partnership also means that an investment by the social sciences is being leveraged 2:1 for a workshop to help set agendas for social scientific (and related humanistic research and training).

In my mind, such a partnership entails a dual responsibility: First, as good collaborators we must take the input from our natural science and engineering colleagues seriously. They are putting up their money not for our sake, but for the sake of the larger purpose, and we must be responsive to their concerns. Second, as good social scientists, we must sketch out a research program that represents the unique contributions that we as a community of social scientists can make. We should not be in instrumental service to our collaborators from across the “two cultures” divide, but rather we should be confidently charting the paths that social science takes toward that larger purpose.

But what if we disagree about that larger purpose? Aye, there is the rub.

For some, maybe that larger purpose is making the world safe for synthetic biology by pre-empting with policy questions of biosafety and biosecurity. For others, it might be constructing a precautionary rationale for supporting a moratorium on some or all types of synthetic biology research. My sense of the larger purpose is getting at the empirical and normative underpinnings of the variety of questions about what “progress” in synthetic biology might mean – and what progress toward the goals that synthetic biology has set out for itself, even if pursued by other instruments, might mean – in order to contribute to setting the research agenda for synthetic biology. In other words, that larger purpose is RRI, and what the partnership is after is giving RRI content with respect to synthetic biology.

The current issue of JRI features three new research articles. In the first, Wickson and Carew (2014) attempt to give content to RRI through the creation of quality criteria and indicators, a process borrowed from their experience with – unsurprisingly – transdisciplinary research. More specifically, Wickson and Carew draw on work with stakeholders in a case of nanoremediation to derive quality criteria, identify significant elements within those criteria, and then develop an evaluative rubric of performance indicators that might help discern in a more concrete way aspects of RRI that then would contribute to a larger conversation about research projects, programs, portfolios, and investments. They conclude that “to engage in any deliberative development of evaluative criteria for RRI will require the active creation and enactment of new spaces for dialogue … [that will also be] open for disagreement and contestation”.

The necessity of that deliberation, disagreement, and contestation is part of Grunwald's (2014) contribution on the hermeneutic aspects of RRI. Grunwald argues that because debates about RRI involve the “attribution of meaning”, then a hermeneutic process is necessary to provide clarity and orientation, especially to fields involving new and emerging technologies that are rife with hopes and fears, promise, and risk. He articulates a set of questions, the answers to which heighten “a debate's reflection and transparency” and help make it “open and unbiased in the sense of a deliberative democracy” (Grunwald 2014). The hermeneutic process is not a full substitute for technology assessment (TA), ethical analysis and the like, but as a necessary precursor and complementing it is the only form of inquiry capable of appropriately grappling in the present with the techno-futures that proliferate in RRI discussions.

Parliamentary TA does not often dwell on the hermeneutical, but expanding our understanding of TA is the purpose of the article by Ganzevles, van Est, and Nentwich (2014). Yoking TA and RI to the same purpose of democratizing technologies, Ganzevles and co-authors represent the “Parliaments and Civil Society in Technology Assessment” (PACITA) project, funded under the 7th Framework Programme to both study and act upon parliamentary TA programs across Europe, including in countries that currently host no native TA capacity. To model the extant and potential diversity of parliamentary TA, Ganzevles and co-authors extend the dimensions of analysis found in the existing literature to four institutional spheres: parliament, government, society, and science and technology. They find not only that their new model can account for the existing diversity of parliamentary TA in a more nuanced way, but also that it can provide some strategic guidance for countries that have no TA tradition to explore one in accordance with various, and potentially novel, combinations they have described.

In one of two new Perspectives pieces in this issue, Hemphill (2014) looks at an intersection between intellectual property (IP) and RI: “patent assertion entities” (PAEs). Such PAEs, or “patent trolls”, practice a deceptive business model that is focused not on licensing new IP, but instead on asserting IP rights against firms already practicing innovation or the technique. PAEs can account for a substantial share of patent infringement suits, causing expense for defendants and stress on the court system, even while losing the vast majority of their challenges. While patent trolls are more problematic in the USA than in Europe, and while legislation that might address them moves slowly through Congress, Hemphill argues that potential US solutions should emphasize ethical business leadership and not penalize entrepreneurs legitimately defending their patents.

In the second Perspectives piece, Chalmers et al. (2014) explore public consultations for the governance of biorepositories (or biobanks) and personalized medicine. Public consultation is crucial not only for developing the public trust upon which large-scale collections rely, but also for establishing a governance approach that serves the public interest. Chalmers et al. (2014) describe a public consultation organized in the Australian state of Tasmania, which has an important history of population genetics research. A process that included random sampling and screening for diversity which led to the recruitment of 25 people who then participated in iterated dialogues and a post-survey. Researchers recorded significant shifts of opinion regarding biobanking and conflicts between idealized solutions and practical realities – neither of which findings could easily be gotten through more traditional polling activities that might otherwise be sought.

This issue also contains two new book reviews. The first, by Raman (2014), looks at Responsible Innovation: From Concept to Practice, authored by Xavier Pavie, Victor Scholten and Daphné Carthy. The book helpfully focuses on the business and organizational aspects of RI, melding both more conceptual work from theories of ethics and sustainable development with cases describing the strategies of well-known firms. Pavie and co-authors argue, in Raman's words, that responsibility will be integrated into private-sector innovation strategies only if RI “can be viewed as source of innovation in its own right”. And while the book attempts to encourage an “ecosystem” approach to understanding innovation and responsibility, its cases focus too much on individual innovators to allow the ecosystems to flourish.

Finally, Biddle (2014) also tackles issues of IP and RI in his review of New Frontiers in the Philosophy of Intellectual Property, edited by Annabelle Lever. The collection contains essays Lever has gathered from a conference on the philosophy of IP at the Institute of Philosophy in London, and the essays include work in moral and political theory, distributive justice, and other perspectives applied to cases of patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. Many such cases come from new and emerging technologies – ranging from rewriting the genetic code to peer-to-peer file sharing to moral exclusions from the patent code – and thus would be of interest to JRI readers.