Responsible innovation: who could be against that?

When I talk about responsible innovation (RI) with people who are unfamiliar with the concept, among the most frequent reactions is, “Who could be against that?” – meaning, I suspect, that both responsibility and innovation have such positive connotations that no one could seriously object to them. Some of my more combative colleagues respond likewise, meaning that RI does not, in their view, bite. RI is not sharp enough to make the enemies one wants to make in order to instigate change.

Both these views may be correct, and yet “RI” might still be a term that you want to use to advance theory and practice.

To explore the RI nomenclature further, consider “responsible innovation” as represented in a standard analytical tool of qualitative social science, the two-by-two matrix (see Figure 1): The axes of the matrix represent, in the horizontal space, increasing levels of innovation, and in the vertical space increasing levels of responsibility. In the upper right (north-east) quadrant, we have RI, and much of this journal is dedicated toward exploring what content that might have. The other quadrants include, caddy-corner in the south-west, “irresponsible stagnation”, in the south-east, “irresponsible innovation”, and in the north-west “responsible stagnation”.

Figure 1. Innovation versus responsibility.

“Irresponsible stagnation” might be something like the world-wide economic downturn – the “Great Recession” – that we have experienced for the last half-dozen years, if (as I do) you find the arguments of economists like Paul Krugman convincing that economic and political prejudice led elites to oppose large-scale public investments and other policies that would have alleviated the human and economic costs of unemployment and reduced the risk of deflation that, as I write, seems to have taken hold in Europe. At a more micro- rather than macro-level, one might also think about the history of various allegations of patent hoarders or patent trolls – companies (or even governments) that generate or acquire intellectual property with the intention not of innovating but of taking aggressive legal against innovating firms that might be infringing on those hoarded patents (e.g. Hemphill 2014).

The presumptive target for RI, however, is “irresponsible innovation”, since we are all presumed to want innovation. To what extent is innovation pursued irresponsibly today? That question is incredibly hard to answer, in part because definitions to help us decide what is responsible and what is not – like that adopted by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the United Kingdom (Owen 2014) – are few and far between. And while some scholars, for example, Bronson (2015) in this issue, who develops a historical argument around genetically modified foods, are willing to point to irresponsibility when they find it, many others are satisfied to stay above the fray. I would not want to be so functionalist as to assert that a movement to advance RI would not have arisen without a need for it driven by irresponsible innovation, but there are at least many examples of the “moon and the ghetto” problem (Nelson 1977), which roughly take the form: “why are we investing so much in [trivially important innovation] when [this much more serious problem] goes wanting attention?” Viewed this way, irresponsible innovation will always be around, as different people with different interests and different commitments will see different innovations as variously trivial or serious. To what extent, then, can scholarship around RI either make these differences more convergent, or at least clarify the differences to allow them to be more productive?

If irresponsible innovation is the target of RI, it might be that “responsible stagnation” (RS), in the final quadrant, is its competitor. RS might affirm something like the following: Given that innovation in part is what got us into this mess of pushing past planetary limits in an unsustainable fashion, and that the drive for growth and the satisfaction of the human needs and desires of a still increasing human population globally is what compels innovation, we need to consider how we can stop being dependent upon innovation and growth to get what we want. I think we have to take this position quite seriously, if only because one of its roots is absolutely correct in that innovation is not in itself a good thing (that is precisely why it needs to be modified by terms like “responsible”!) and that the means of grappling with our planetary challenges should not be limited to the technological ones that are so wrapped up in our concept of innovation (even if we give lip service to concepts like social innovation).

But here's the rub: even if we can address our long-term planetary challenges through the redesign of the economy from its roots in households to the global scope of its transactions and impacts to achieve RS, that redesign is going to be dependent upon on the generation and implementation of new knowledge and social and technological innovation each step of the way. In this sense, RI may well turn out to be that which assists us in bending the arc of social and technological development toward this goal and away from other diversions.

In this first issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation's second volume, each of our four research papers makes substantial headway in providing important content and normative guidance to RI. As Kiran, Verbeek, and Oudshoorn (2015) put it, we are taking RI “beyond checklists”. In their view, which begins from the trajectory of the development of technology assessment, the ethical aspects of new and emerging technologies have been ignored relative to the more easily quantifiable environmental health and safety aspects. While an approach to ethical technology assessment has developed, Asle and colleagues argue that it has relied too much on a checklist approach that remains aloof or external to the processes of technology development. Instead, they draw on more constructive approaches of “technology accompaniment” that recognize that humans are being shaped by technologies as surely as we are shaping them. A fully ethical constructive technology assessment would thus “make visible how … moral responsibility is enacted in daily life” vis-à-vis new technologies.

In the second research paper, Deblonde (2015) proceeds from the supposition above that the movement toward responsible research and innovation (RRI) is an indication of the unsatisfactory link between societal progress and the science and technology that purports to promote it, and she observes that the connection between the vaunted knowledge economy and RRI is not self-evident. An alternative, in apparent sympathy with the argument about RS above, Deblonde proposes that “glocal sustainability research” – knowledge creation to address locally concrete examples of global sustainability – challenges to fill this void. Performing this “GSR” research is challenging to and within existing institutional structures, but reforms to intellectual property, remuneration schemes for researchers, and the development of appropriately supportive business plans are possible.

For Erik Fisher and colleagues (2015), in the third research article, calls for responsible innovation generally imply the need for socio-technical integration, but the different forms of socio-technical integration require unpacking. Based on insights developed through the “Communities of Integration” group, which brings together several research groups studying socio-technical integration, the authors develop a typology that identifies these forms and relates them both to distinguishable means and ends, and to idealized modes of operation. These modes (reform, problematize, augment, facilitate), which also might be called strategies, reflect strategic decisions for responsible innovation, and the difference between “problematize” and “facilitate”, for example, reflects exactly that issue of whether responsible innovation in fact has sufficient bite.

Bronson (2015), in the fourth research paper, takes a historical approach to trace the development of hybrid seeds and genetically engineered (GE) seed systems, showing how in Canada (and likely elsewhere) these technologies were co-produced with an infrastructure favoring large techno-scientific enterprises and productivist visions of agriculture. As noted earlier, Bronson calls out previously articulated desiderata for RI, for example, formalized engagement between technicians and the broad interests of the relevant community – as opposed to, in the hybrid seed case, narrowly constructed corporate interests – or “upstream mutual engagement” as opposed to the GE case, in which engagement occurred only after controversy was engendered. Here, we have not just any old technology but, as Bronson emphasizes, an ancient one central to human socio-technical networks and well-being, that fails some of our well-considered criteria of responsibility.

Finally, Brian (2015) provides a brief overview of a special collection of articles in JRI's “Perspectives” section: “Responsible Research and Innovation for Synthetic Biology”. These even briefer than usual Perspectives cover a broad canvas of issues related to synthetic biology, from questions of sustainability and of local context that might appeal to Deblonde, to questions of novelty and bioeconomy that cross the attention to corporate interests attended by Bronson, to processes of social science research and TA that would interest Kiran and colleagues.

And of course I hope they appeal to and interest you.