Responsible innovation in business: a critical reflection on deliberative engagement as a central governance mechanism

ABSTRACT

One of the main contentions of the framework for Responsible Innovation (RI) is that social and ethical aspects have to be addressed by deliberative engagement with stakeholders and the wider public throughout the innovation process. The aim of this article is to reflect on the question to what extent is deliberative engagement suitable for conducting RI in business. We discuss several tensions that arise when this framework is applied in the business context. Further, we analyse the place of deliberative engagement in several theories of business ethics. We conclude that there remains a tension between the ideal of RI and the way in which the competitive market operates. Hence, RI scholars should reflect more critically on changes that are required in the market in order to make RI possible, modify the ideal of deliberative engagement for RI in business, or attempt to strike a balance between these two responses.

KEYWORDS:

• Responsible innovation
• deliberative engagement
• inclusive governance
• stakeholder theory
• political CSR
• market failures approach

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Teunis Brand is PhD-candidate at Wageningen University (The Netherlands). He has a background in Economics (MSc, Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Philosophy (MA, Free University Amsterdam). He is currently working on a project about Responsible Innovation in the food industry. In this project, he explores the responsibility of food companies for healthy product development, and the role of stakeholder dialogue concerning healthy food.

Vincent Blok is associate professor in Business Ethics, Responsible Innovation, and Sustainable Entrepreneurship at the social sciences group, Wageningen University, and research fellow at the Faculty of Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen. Blok’s research group is specialised in sustainable entrepreneurship, business ethics, and responsible innovation and is involved in several (European) research projects in the field of sustainable entrepreneurship and responsible innovation. Blok’s work has appeared in Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Cleaner Production, Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, Journal of Responsible Innovation and others. See www.vincentblok.nl for more information about his current research.

ORCID

Teunis Brand http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2499-6071

Vincent Blok http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9086-4544

Notes

1. We understand innovation in a broad way, including innovations in process and in products, and including innovations that are incremental and more radical. Since we discuss RI in the business context, the focus lies on commercial innovation (which is what we refer to with ‘market-driven’ innovation).

2. Throughout this article, we only use the term RI, except when we refer to or quote article that use the term RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation). We use RI because research plays no significant role in this article.

3. We recognize that our definition of deliberation is very broad. When studying specific forms of deliberation, specification and operationalization of the concept is needed. A good overview of different types of deliberation can be found in Fung (2003). A very interesting operationalization of deliberation is developed by Steenbergen et al. (2003).

4. Hasnas (1998) distinguishes three normative theories of business ethics: shareholder theory, stakeholder theory, and social contracts theory. The market failures approach can be seen as an elaborate version of shareholder theory. This approach is recently much more discussed, also in relation to corporate political activities and corporate governance (Norman 2011; Singer 2016; Norman 2015; Néron 2016). We have chosen political CSR instead of the social contracts approach because the prominence of the former in current debates, and because of the similarities with RI.

5. That does not mean that, from this view, managers do not have any duties towards other stakeholders. They do, but these duties do not have the fiduciary form.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supporting by NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) [grant number 313-99-302].; Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek