Towards principled Responsible Research and Innovation: employing the Difference Principle in funding decisions

Figures & data

Table 1. Some obstacles to focusing publicly funded research and innovation on socially beneficial targets.

	Problem	Examples
Avoidable lack of foresight	Whilst more and more methods exist to involve the public in designing desirable futures, for example, constructive TA (Schot and Rip 1996), or real-time TA (Guston and Sarewitz 2002), such efforts cannot always be realised successfully	In 2010, the Netherlands put on hold a new system of national Electronic Health Records after serious concerns about data protection were raised by civil society groups. In 2008 alone, the wasted expenditure was 100 million Euros (Smit 2010)
Exclusion of voices	Focusing innovation on socially beneficial targets requires a pluralistic input that in turn assumes widespread access to policy structures. In reality only few organised groups have such access	Over 4500 lobbyists are active in the European Parliament; 72% of Parliamentary Members meet lobbyists at least once a month and receive more often voting instructions by interest groups than their national governments (Karapiperis and Ladikas 2004). Lobbying mobilises significant resources too: $3.5 billion was disclosed for lobbying the US federal government in 2009 (Alter 2010)
Reasonable disagreement	Even widespread consultation cannot always guarantee agreement on social ends given the different perceptions of the human good	In autumn 2013 a joint statement of the public health associations of Europe (IEA, ISEE, EUPHA) was issued to call for a major revision of the Horizon 2020 Work Programme, which allegedly biases research funding towards personalised medicine to the detriment of public health (Eupha 2013). The Work Programme had been agreed after extensive consultations

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