Notes from the S.NET conference

Introduction

Within the current, wide-reaching debate on responsible innovation (Hankins 2012; Owen, Bessant, and Heintz 2013; Pavie, Scholten, and Carthy, forthcoming), the fifth annual meeting of Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies (S.NET) provided a rare, inclusive space for discussion, as speakers were drawn from diverse academic and non-academic fields. Organized by the S.NET, the conference took place at the Northeastern University School of Law in Boston between 27 and 29 October 2013 and was one of the largest gatherings within the developing field of responsible innovation since the Netherlands-based Responsible Innovation Conference of 2012.

Numerous panels, plenary sessions, and round-table discussions within the meeting focused on a variety of responsible innovation issues, notably how to contextualize the issue of responsibility in the history of innovation, which models of policy and governance to propose for responsible innovation, and which refined understanding of responsible innovation could support these developments. In this brief report, I can only refer to a small selection of the papers presented within the panel sessions that I attended myself, and as a result many papers have been excluded.

In the opening plenary, Andrew Maynard of the University of Michigan gave his own interpretation of the history of innovation, describing how the industrial revolution had only unwittingly led to the need for policy and governance of innovation. He argued that industrial development led to a change in the very goals of innovation, in that it shifted the innovators' focus from social improvement to economic gain. He described how this change broke up an “innovation chain” that had previously prevented negative effects running free as industry developed. In other words, Maynard argued that before innovation became geared purely to money-making, it had often been aimed at resolving social and technical problems caused by previous forms of innovation. Under the new model, however, innovation is no longer linked to previous developments, the effects of which are left to run their own course. Thus innovation for social good has become largely a matter of coincidence rather than of planning.

Policy, governance and regulation

Policy, governance and regulation were central themes for the conference as a whole, and much of the debate revolved around the types of interventions that might work in order to push a move towards a model of responsible innovation.

Issues surrounding governance were tackled in the plenary discussion outlined above, as Maynard described the moment in which an innovation system based on checks-and-balances falls apart, leading to a need for external regulation. Regardless of whether Maynard's model gives an accurate account of how innovation evolved in history – some might think that the industrial revolution is not necessarily such a hard and fast divide, for example – it is undoubtedly useful to highlight how innovation is technology and capital-driven rather than merely a response to societal needs. Mending this mismatch would call, nevertheless, for more than good will, but rather a governance intervention.

Technocratic approaches

Broadly speaking, there were two general approaches regarding policy, one of which could be described as technocratic, and another as more participatory. The technocratic approach is probably best represented by European Union and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) publications regarding the embedding of responsible research and innovation processes within their funded projects. The criteria set out by the funding bodies, therefore, become policy guidance themselves. As described by Lee and Petts (2013) and Fisher and Rip (2013), current policies for responsible innovation relies upon several different forms of regulation, from “soft” or voluntary to “hard” or obligatory forms. In one case, regulating bodies have to somehow define acceptable boundaries within which operators must remain and pass legislation to uphold their decisions. Other institutions aim to steer innovation in a more socially advantageous and responsible direction. Sheila Jasanoff of Harvard University critically took up this issue, however. She argued that regulatory powers are being internalized by disciplines making them responsible to themselves or to self-appointed governing bodies – giving synthetic biology and nanotechnology as examples – leading to the closing down of public debate surrounding their development.

The development of a regulatory framework for steering as opposed to limiting innovation was addressed in many ways by several speakers. In a paper co-authored with Rene' von Schomberg from the European Commission, Carl Mitcham from the Colorado School of Mines discussed the need to have research and innovation driven by broadly shared public values, to further institutionalize foresight and technology assessment methods, and to make ethics a driving factor of innovation rather than a constraint.

The debate about policy also brought up many questions. Issues such as the difficulty that policy-makers face when drawing up laws or regulation about complex science they might not fully understand were raised by many, as well as conflicts of interest that arise when too many experts are involved. Transnational differences and expectations, the time lag between development and legislation, and the difficulty of seeing problems that may only become apparent through the scaling-up process were also debated, as well as cases – types of geo-engineering, for example – for which there are possibly no viable alternatives to real-world testing.

Sally Randles of the University of Manchester proposed refining our understanding of responsible innovation in order to better implement and promote policy and governance by offering a model of five building blocks for an “institutionalist sociology” of responsible innovation. Steering an independent course between micro-ethnography and a normative, regulatory approach, she uses the “blocks” as a tool to unpack innovation into specific transformative processes: (1) rethinking responsible innovation as a historically situated object; (2) looking at actors’ and collective normative positions; (3) avoiding technological determinism by considering systems of interdependencies of artefacts, organizations, and cultures; (4) specifying responsible governance as a set of structuring devices that can steer innovation towards a variety of normative positions; and (5) valuing performative and transformative agency, including Schumpeterian creative destruction.

Societal involvement

The issue of broad societal involvement in decision-making processes was brought up in several forms within several different frameworks. Charles Anica Endo of the Ecole de Technologie Superieure in Quebec presented a graphic illustration of how Henry Etzkowitz's “triple helix” model of innovation could be modified into a quadruple helix, involving society throughout the innovation process by bringing it and its interests in from the very beginning.

The related issue of education was addressed by Emily York of the University of California, San Diego, who analysed techniques used for teaching students about nanotechnology, raising questions about what students actually take from the lectures with respect to ethics and responsibility. She argued that lecturers tend to brush problematic questions aside, taking uncritical approaches to the subject matter and fostering their own belief in pushing the “nano-dream”.

An example that brings together many of the points raised here came from Mickael Pero of the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research through his discussion of the siting of national science and technology infrastructure. He compared debates about siting, contrasting local perceptions of the nature and desirability of the scientific knowledge actually generated and the perceived strategic advantages (or not) of having certain infrastructure in a specific location. Pero pointed to a duality that is played out during such siting decisions, with sites competing to attract or repel different types of infrastructure and creating the very societal dynamics within which discourse and negotiations of responsibility are played out.

Other related issues brought different perspectives. Governance inaction was one of the concerns raised in Maynard's plenary, and several speakers raised the point that societal involvement was not unproblematic and should not be seen solely as an aim or a “good” in itself.

Participatory approaches

A line of argument that I felt was rather unrepresented at the conference lies closer to my own interests and those of the Bassetti Foundation, namely, approaches working towards the practical involvement of social scientists in natural science and engineering endeavours. Several authors have recently described projects that involved placing social scientists within laboratories or research centres in order to provoke debate both within the labs and between science and the broader society (Fisher 2007; Bird and Fisher 2011). A current example is Stilgoe, Owen and Macnaghten's (2013) open access piece on, “Developing a Framework for Responsible Innovation”. This article presents as a case study the involvement of social scientists in the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) project as an example of how such interventions can be conducive of actual actions. The introduction of the social scientists seems to have had real effect upon the research, with the team deciding to abandon their experiment due to concerns raised in shared discussion. The paper concludes, “In the case of the SPICE project, the Responsible Innovation approach introduced reflection, anticipation, inclusive deliberation and responsiveness, materially influencing the direction of a contentious, charged and highly uncertain area of emerging technoscience.”

The few papers at the conference to address a similar approach that I heard were given by Dorothy Dankel of the University of Bergen and Collette Bos of Utrecht University. In her paper, Dankel described her experience of working as a social scientist in a biotechnology laboratory in which research is carried out to produce synthetic vaccines. During her project she posed questions to the scientists involved in the research and organized meetings among experts, social scientists and philosophers of science. This collaborative, interdisciplinary group examined the problem of creating a common understanding of objects such as synthetic vaccines across expert clusters and the general public. During this process, Dankel and colleagues opened up new spaces for vaccine scientists to openly discuss and reflect upon how they imagine their developments being used. She also reported that further discussions are planned for this type of reflexive exercise together with the so-called vaccine nay-sayers, to see if indeed informed dialogues between scientists and the general public can foster a shared understanding or a “common sense” of vaccines. Bos presented her experience of working with solar panel researchers, demonstrating how different motivations for operational choices may affect decision-making that leads to research following a more or less responsible approach. She further pointed out how the need to garner research funds is an important factor in these motivations and choices.

Conclusions

I believe that the sociological understandings of real-world decision-making processes that are gained through such observational and participatory approaches can only enrich research into responsible innovation. Such an ethnographic approach does not have to be merely descriptive, but can contribute to the drawing of a regulatory framework in a richer and more nuanced way than the application of a pre-existing set of principles may allow. A participatory approach may well go some way towards allowing policy-makers and governing bodies access to the informal mechanisms of research design, practice, and public perception.

The conference raised many questions regarding the study of responsible innovation, in some ways laying bare the developing and rapidly expanding nature of the field. Several definitions of responsible innovation were used, each with differing core traits – including, for example, social desirability, sustainability, or public participation. But the overarching needs expressed were those of improving today's innovation policies in the light of a better understanding of innovation processes, alongside the need for a critical study of responsible innovation.

Notes on contributor

Jonathan Hankins is Foreign Scientific Correspondent for the Bassetti Foundation for Responsible Innovation. Much of his work is published online in blog format, collections of which are published through the Bassetti Book Series. He is currently based in Boston, USA.