Responsible research and innovation: hopes and fears in the scientific community in Europe

ABSTRACT

We conducted interviews among some 80 researchers and research executives on their understanding of and their attitudes toward ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ (RRI). The relevant notion of RRI concerns granting influence on research projects to the general public and stakeholders (‘science with society’), for one, or focusing research on the common good (‘science for society’), for another. We identified a welcoming attitude regarding RRI in the scientific community, but also worries that should be heeded in any effort to implement RRI. Concerns arise with respect to fears of ignorance and bias of societal agents, the loss of the autonomy of science, the neglect of basic research by RRI procedures, the difficulty to anticipate research outcomes and their social impact as well as the additional expenditure required by engaging with societal actors. Such worries provide information about obstacles in the scientific community and thus suggest ways of structuring acceptable RRI schemes.

KEYWORDS:

• Responsible research and innovation
• public participation
• attitudes in the scientific community
• interview study

Acknowledgments

The study was part of the NUCLEUS Project that involved 24 institutions from Europe as well as Georgia, China and South Africa and was supported by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 framework (GA-Nr.: 664932). The authors wish to thank Ellen Böger and Stefan Fuchs for organizing and conducting most of the interviews and Ellen Böger for preparing the analysis. They also wish to thank Caitríona Mordan and Anne Dijkstra for contributing to organizing and carrying out interviews and Peter Broks for providing advice on the analysis. Furthermore, they would like to express their gratitude to Alexander Gerber (Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences) for leading the project as well as to the whole NUCLEUS Consortium for input, feedback and support. The authors would also like to thank all interview partners for their contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Martin Carrier is professor of philosophy at Bielefeld University. His research presently deals with methodological characteristics of research that is subject to economic and political demands, with heuristic strategies suited to make research practically beneficial, responsible research and innovation, and the public credibility of science. He is a member of the German Academy of Science Leopoldina and various other German and European Academies. He was awarded the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Association (DFG) for 2008, the Blaise-Pascal-Medal for Social Sciences and Humanities for 2015 by the European Academy of Science, the Canadian Diefenbaker Award for 2016, and the Werner-Heisenberg Medal of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation 2018.

Notes

1 Many authors use the term ‘stakeholder’ to include all sorts of social agents ranging from companies to the general public (see, e.g., Blok and Lemmens 2015). But in view of the heterogeneity of the groups subsumed under this heading, such an all-encompassing terminology is misleading.

2 For reasons of readability, we do not include detailed references for the answers we received. Upon request, we provide anonymized excerpts of the interviews. References are given for direct quotations by indicating the number of the interview (assigned internally) and the page of the interview transcript. Interviews with research executives are distinguished by the prefix ‘RE’; the remainder refers to interviews with researchers.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Horizon 2020: [grant number 664932].