Responsible innovation: motivations for a new journal

In contemporary culture, the image of technology as a passive tool to serve us and to satisfy our desires is increasingly revealed as illusory. Technology is a world-shaping force, a force that also shapes us as inhabitants of that world, in both our individual and communal facets. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler (1998) points out that this predicament is nothing new. Ever since the first ape grasped a stone to smash a nut, technology has helped shape who we are. It shaped our activities, our emotions and even the contours and capacities of our bodies. Our hands would not have evolved as they did, if it were not for the tools that we have wielded. That is why Stiegler characterizes the human condition in terms of an “original technicity”: We are technological beings.

Yet, as the social critic Lewis Mumford (1967) pointed out, we likely over-emphasize this technological heritage because material culture – the stuff we make – holds up better in the fossil record than the “softer” aspects of our culture: our abilities to care, create and cooperate, to love, laugh and learn, and to find and make meaning. Just as our tools shaped our hands, our cooperative hunting behavior yielded the calories that fed the growth of our brains. We are more than technological beings; to forget either aspect is to limit ourselves, drastically. And remembering this dual heritage is not to say that we as individuals or societies are chained to our understanding of our natural selves. It is instead to remind us of the stuff we have to work with, when we look at our world and think, “We might do better”.

While technology as a phenomenon may be as ancient as the human race, the realization of technology's world-shaping powers is of a much more recent date, commencing in the West roughly at the Industrial Revolution and accelerating since. We live in a world characterized by what philosopher Hans Jonas (1984 [1979]) described as the “altered nature of human action,” mediated by technology. In this new world, everything from the molecular machinery of the cell to the climate system of the planet is potentially within the technological reach, if not the sure grasp, of humanity. The extent of this ambition – reductionist in orientation, global in scale and intergenerational in reach – and the innovations it inspires require us to look beyond an “ethics of the neighborhood” that heretofore shaped the contours of morally and legally acceptable behavior. Understanding how, and to what extent (or even whether) a more fitting sense of responsibility can be conceptualized, configured, and distributed across such innovations and the complex systems in which they are embedded is the main objective of this new journal.

Many critics of technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries imagined that technological artifacts would ultimately end up enslaving their former masters, thus not only turning the tables on them but also creating an enduring trope for campy science fiction. Such critics can be forgiven their folly, especially when considered alongside the nineteenth and twentieth century scientists and technologists who envisioned the finality of Newtonian physics, cheap and plentiful nuclear power and of course flying cars. Nevertheless, we write in the midst of a great burst of achievement in artificial intelligence and robotics, as well as shattering revelations of a high-tech surveillance campaign by the US National Security Agency of almost unimaginable scope. Twelve years after Joy's (2000) provocation in his essay “Why the future doesn't need us,” irrelevance, if not slavery, does not seem off the table.

While bold predictions more optimistic than Joy's remain the stock-and-trade of contemporary scientists, engineers and innovators, we social scientists and humanists have largely changed our tune. A host of historians, sociologists, ethnographers, philosophers and others have come to a consensus that technologies evolve and become socially embedded (or not) in a way deeply influenced by human values, preferences and choices, rather than one reliant solely on the internal logics of those technologies or determined entirely by the most efficient pathway. People design technologies to advance certain interests and constrain others. Cultural practices and institutional structures add further dimensions of complexity. Technologies can catalyze certain types of politics and may even require certain forms of governance. Innovation, as much about people as about products, processes and systems, is central to politics – which perhaps to the chagrin of many is anything but deterministic.

Self-conscious recognition of this mutual shaping, co-evolution, or co-production of society and technology is a distinctive feature of contemporary research and innovation policy. In recent decades, policy-makers have demonstrated a growing willingness to abandon the model of an autonomous, deterministic science and technology, preferring at least in some circumstances a model that includes explicit arrangements for governance (Rodriguez, Fisher, and Schuurbiers 2013). To be sure, some motivation for this new orientation is the desire for more rapid innovation and more of it – there exists in many circles an almost religious faith in “innovation” as both necessary and unequivocally beneficial. Meanwhile, a range of considerations continues to suggest that innovation is a legitimate topic for normative reflection, deliberation and evaluation (Schot and Rip 1997; Williams and Edge 1996). However novel the most recent of these governance initiatives appear, they are heir to earlier endeavors in technology assessment, the economic productivity of research, research ethics, engineering ethics, and the ethical, legal and social implications of research that are themselves deeply rooted historically in visions of how science and society (ought to) relate. Many of these endeavors and their antecedents sought the refinement of the meliorative power of science and technology in collaboration with the humanities and social sciences. A decade prior to C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures (1961 [1959]), Detlev Bronk (1975, 413) – a founder of biophysics and later president of the National Academy of Sciences – entreated the United States Congress to include the social sciences in the mandate of the proposed National Science Foundation so that “[c]ompetent social scientists should work hand-in-hand with natural scientists, so that problems may be solved as they arise, and so that many of them may not arise in the first instance.”

Such self-conscious socio-technical integration, with an aim toward better innovations for a better society, would wait decades to emerge (Fisher, Mahajan, and Mitcham 2006). It was not until the dawn of the new millennium that the terms “responsible innovation” (RI), “responsible research and innovation” (RRI) and “responsible development” fully emerged and began to represent the increasingly important discussions about the kind of collaborations that Bronk proposed. RI has come to the fore in connection with the variety of emerging technologies, including genetically modified organisms and synthetic biology, information and communication technology, robotics and geoengineering. In particular, the language of RI and its cognates began to take off along with large-scale national programs to conduct R&D on nanotechnology. Following language introduced by the US Congress, the US National Nanotechnology Initiative adopted a strategic goal of “responsible development.” The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council created a pilot study in RI for nanotechnology for carbon capture (and, as seen in the “Perspective” piece by Owen [2014] in this issue, a new policy for RI more generally as well). The Netherlands organized a “national dialogue” on nanotechnology to conclude that its further development should be “responsible.” In Japan, discussions of the societal aspects of nanotechnology led by its National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology have been characterized as RI. Nanotechnology has attracted all this attention because it exemplifies a technology that is known not only for its potentially high stakes, uncertainty and possible adverse effects, but also for what might be called a politics of novelty that it introduces by repositioning earlier debates (e.g. about toxic chemicals) within novel social, material and institutional contexts (Guston 2013). The similar characteristics of what others have called “post-normal science” (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993) have inspired calls to involve a broader array of stakeholders and laypersons in decision-making about the value of such work. Or, as derived from Winner's (1977, 2011) recognition that both technology and legislation shape the ways that people pursue their visions of good in the world, we should have no “innovation without representation.”

In the co-evolutionary or co-productionist motif, it is not just the characteristics of emerging technologies that have placed RI on the agenda of policy-makers, however. As recounted in a report from a 2011 European Commission workshop in Brussels, RRI has emerged on the formal agenda because innovation policy actors across sectors are drawing on past experiences in the hopes of motivating the development of technologies for social benefit, preventing both disasters and the loss of promising technological advances, and addressing public anxiety over unintended and irreversible consequences. The EC report argues that globalization and the loss of public trust in elite public and private institutions have fed apparently competing imperatives for a more deliberate and yet more accelerated approach to innovation. Given the large investments that national governments and private firms make in research and innovation, calls arise for a more reflective and deliberative role for a broad set of actors so that the purposes, motivations and possible ramifications of innovation are taken into account early on and can inform decision-making about choices that must be made in the here-and-now.

Over the last few years, a host of high-level meetings and research groups, projects and networks around the world have begun to address the conceptualization and institutionalization of RI (Fisher and Rip 2013). In Europe, attention to RRI has become manifest in the funding of four large-scale, multi-institutional projects under the 7th Framework Program: Governance for Responsible Innovation (GREAT), based at the University of Namur, Belgium; the Global Model and Observatory for International Responsible Research and Innovation Coordination (Project Responsibility), based at the Fraunhofer Institute, Germany; ProGReSS, based at the University of Central Lancashire, UK; and the Governance Framework for Responsible Research and Innovation (Res-AGorA) project, also at the Frauenhofer Institute. Europe's Horizon 2020 Programme includes a “Science with and for Society” work program that features RRI. In the USA, the National Science Foundation has funded a Virtual Institute for Responsible Innovation, linking American efforts in RI at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University to those in Europe as well as to smaller groups in Canada and Brazil. A patchwork international network for RI is thus forming.

It is our hope that the Journal of Responsible Innovation will help nurture and communicate such work, which not only involves scholars and teachers from a variety of disciplines and fields, but also practitioners in such areas as technology assessment, management and strategy, research funding, and science and innovation policy. The Journal of Responsible Innovation will help manifest and broaden that network by providing a platform to articulate and discuss the many unsolved questions surrounding RI, and by inviting new and surprising perspectives from scholars and practitioners who take an interest in reflecting on and debating RI.

Toward this end, the Journal of Responsible Innovation invites contributions that explore and apply concepts of responsibility to knowledge-based innovations and innovation policies. The journal is interested in perspectives that anticipate and assess the risks and adverse effects related to new technologies, but also the ways in which they influence what individuals are able to do and to be (Grunwald 2009; Swierstra, Stemering, and Boenink 2009). For example, technologies to determine the risk of disease through new imaging or assaying techniques and advances in artificial intelligence and robotics allow us to make previously unavailable choices and experience ourselves in unprecedented ways, raising such questions as: What kind of role do we want technology to play in our lives? How do we want to live? How can technology and our choices about it support us in leading that life? New energy sources, new materials, and new information and communication technologies influence how we relate to the natural world, and to other people, and influence how we depend on them. Such developments raise other questions: What kind of society do we want to create, and how can technology help us do that? Technologies of synthetic biology that imagine resurrecting extinct species or of geoengineering that imagine planetary-level interventions to combat global warming, emerge against a history of changing relationships between humans and the natural environment. How do we want to coexist with the other inhabitants of planet earth? What are our duties toward them, and toward future generations, with the innovations we choose to introduce or forego? Such questions require public debate and reflection about the desirability of these technologies and their plausible ramifications, as well as the nature of anticipatory methods that might inform such debate.

JRI invites contributions that articulate criteria for productive engagement with innovations, whether through rational deliberation or productive conflict, as well as with the public policies or private actions that govern their development. The journal welcomes articles that investigate various methods to meaningfully discipline and productively inform ongoing debates on substantive, future-oriented questions about new and emerging technologies. These debates may operate within the traditional risk or technology assessment frameworks, but the journal especially encourages broader inquiries into technologies' influence on human life and social risk. Such broader aspects might also be understood in a good life ethics approach that seeks a positive heuristic for ethical technology assessments and helps to point out how singular human actions, practices and routines are constitutive of a good life and how technologies can contribute to realizing it. While some have argued that reflection about the good life belongs to the private domain of persons rather than the public domain of science and technology (von Schomberg 2012), the pervasiveness and influence of technology in human private lives justifies at least asking questions about technology and the good life. Where should these questions be considered? By whom? At what time? And what are the consequences of our answers for our common understanding of the line between these private and public realms, and the place of technology?

The journal is also interested in reflections on the purpose of RI and the actions that are part of it. What does this term “responsible innovation” (and its cognates) mean? Should any or all “science” be understood as a step in the innovation process, such that it, too, needs a framework for responsibility? Which philosophical approaches to “responsibility” are most suitable, and which help best to explain the purpose of RI? What discursive and institutional structures facilitate or hinder dialog – in specific cases and in more general perspectives? The Journal of Responsible Innovation offers a forum for research into these types of questions and concerns that may be methodological, philosophical or empirical in approach.

JRI seeks to provide a platform for the increasing number of (often highly interdisciplinary) scholars working in this arena. The journal thus offers room for scholarship that may belong to individual disciplines, but that is also enriched by connection to other disciplines, or that is more self-consciously multi-disciplinary in approach. Scholarship published by JRI will involve such diverse fields as ethics, social science, law and economics – as well as natural science and engineering – and often close collaboration across these areas. Determining what RI is, and how it can be realized or productively contested in specific research and development processes, implies that discrepancies among these perspectives will need to be clarified, explored and to some extent bridged in the process of envisioning common technological futures.

The journal desires to include not only scholars, but also practitioners in areas of focus such as technology assessment, strategic research management and research funding, as well as teachers across all these areas (from traditional arts and sciences fields to engineering, business and other professional training areas). It is dedicated to publishing articles that demonstrate excellent scholarship and can also frame discussions and elicit debate among experts in the field; inform the efforts of scientists, engineers, designers and other innovators to participate in RI, and of policy-makers to make better decisions about technological innovations and innovation policy; explore how the public can develop more informed, substantive and nuanced opinions about innovation; and help teachers across a variety of fields to prepare their students for the normative questions they will encounter in their careers in innovation.

The Journal of Responsible Innovation will publish articles in four sections. The first will be traditional research articles, up to about 12,000 words, from theoretical, normative or empirical perspectives. In this inaugural issue, we present four such research articles. The first, by Asante, Owen, and Williamson (2014), is an empirical case study that explores through ethnographic detail de facto governance in the private sector. Such case studies are appropriate for a young field to accumulate, and Asante et al. remind us that innovations worthy of attention also include social technologies like the financial instruments they study. The second article, by Glerup and Horst (2014), draws a typology of sorts for the social responsibility of science by identifying a literature and applying a Foucauldian analysis to map political rationalities for the governance of science. The four-fold typology that Glerup and Horst derive not only demonstrates the inextricable nature of science in society with respect to questions of responsibility, but also serves as a potentially useful scheme for argumentative style and policy approaches to RI.

The second two articles are more theoretical and normative in orientation. Holbrook and Briggle (2014) take on the twin challenges of the principles of precaution and proaction as guides for policy. With a nod to the emergent controversy over hydraulic fracturing, Holbrook and Briggle show how both principles, like their cognates in bioethics, are insufficient guides to making decisions in contested policy environments. And van Oudheusden (2014), after a detailed review of some of the intellectual origins of RI, wonders aloud about the absence of politics and power from current discussions. He draws on brief case studies of European-level policy and regional (Flemish) technology assessment to reflect on – and make recommendations for – the more productive inclusion of politics in considerations of RI.

While these articles establish the journal on strong empirical and theoretical research, we also want to broaden the journal's appeal by including challenging, provocative scholarship in different forms. In each issue, we hope to publish a discussion paper – an article somewhat shorter than a traditional research article (about 6000 words) that stakes out a position, explores an issue or probes a controversy, but does not wrap it all up in a neat package like a research paper. We then commission several brief responses (about 2000 words) for open review rather than blind peer review as for the research articles and “Perspectives” (below). In this inaugural issue, Nordmann (2014) offers something akin to a set of 15 theses about the role of anticipation and foresight in technology assessment and RI. Skeptical of human efforts to grasp the future, Nordmann offers a challenge to specify RI in a form that does not require knowledge of the future or anticipating specific impacts of innovations. Responding to Nordmann are van der Burg (2014), Selin (2014) and Wilsdon (2014), and each takes up Nordmann's gauntlet in her or his own way. Van der Burg identifies smaller, more personal ways in which envisioning the future is productive and even necessary for orienting and giving meaning to actions in the present moment. Selin matches Nordmann's skepticism with the history of scholarship in the field of futures studies, but in doing so she nevertheless derives a compelling argument for the use rather than the rejection of scenario-based and other future-oriented methods. Wilsdon ponders how real-world approaches might be endowed with Nordmann's perspective, identifying the particularly important role of historical reflection and hindsight in a policy world that is obsessed by novelty and foresight.

JRI also includes an intentionally ecumenical section of “Perspectives and Reviews” to provide the opportunity for scholars and practitioners to publish still shorter pieces (around 2000 words) that, while potentially derived from research, are somewhat more descriptively or polemically oriented. Perspectives, which are submitted for external blind review, may, for example, articulate the vision of a particular research organization, ad hoc committee, expert report or individual. In the current issue, Owen (2014) describes the adoption by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research of the UK of a framework for RI, closely derived from scholarship that motivates consideration of anticipation, reflection, engagement and action in responses to funding calls. Taebi et al. (2014) offer a second perspective that discusses the role of public values – defined intersubjectively from public debate – in RI, and the consequent importance of a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach that attends to values in design and the role of institutions and stakeholder engagement in achieving those values. A third perspective comes from Hankins (2014), who provides an insightful précis of the various and numerous presentations related to RI at the 2013 annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies, held in Boston, MA, USA, at Northeastern University and chaired by Christopher Bosso.

Reviews will include explications and assessments not only of scholarly books, but also of professional and governmental reports, blogs and even other cultural artifacts such as movies, science museum exhibits and art installations that touch on the themes of RI. In the current issue, Moore (2014) praises Ottinger's (2013) book, Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice, for its sophisticated treatment of the ways that industry experts “de-fang” public opponents not through overwhelming technical superiority but rather through a softer strategy of partnership and compliance that leaves underlying issues of environmental health and justice essentially untouched. De Saille (2014) meditates on the complex, sensitive and beautifully rendered presentation of issues in contemporary human enhancement technologies by Regan Brashear's documentary film, Fixed. Julio Tuma (2014) assesses the recent multi-authored volume edited by (JRI associate editors) Simone van der Burg and Tsjalling Swierstra (2013), Ethics on the Laboratory Floor, as a timely and thorough collection of the “vanguard” of applied ethics scholarship pertaining to research and innovation. Finally, Eden (2014) reviews the more prosaic but still influential summary of Special Eurobarometer 401, a study on public attitudes related to RRI, which provides both some clarity and some ambiguity for efforts to ground elements of RI in public support.

The journal will also include peer-reviewed articles on pedagogy. While we had no manuscripts to present in the first issue, we hope that instructors as well as students will consider submitting professionally and pedagogically oriented case studies that are up-to-date as well as sufficiently attuned to the empirical characteristics of the contexts in which technologies are developed, used or governed. JRI would also be interested in assessments of a variety of interventions – both formal classroom interventions such as courses and informal interventions from laboratory engagements to museum exhibits and programs. Such material could help expand interest in and use of the journal, not the least because undergraduate and graduate courses in ethics and related areas have become common offerings and even mandatory parts of the engineering and research curricula in many countries.

There are numerous people to thank for the significant undertaking of starting a new journal. The team at Routledge/Taylor & Francis has been enthusiastic, responsive and professional from the very start. Miles Brundage at Arizona State University has been a dedicated editorial assistant. The 24 member, international editorial board demonstrated remarkable fervor in joining and contributing to this start-up enterprise, and the associate editors (who really launched this process a short four years ago) and the editor-in-chief have worked ensemble to begin drawing together an intellectual community and common understanding of RI that we hope will make real contributions not only to scholarship but also to the ways in which science, technology and innovation exist in the world.

And thank you, reader, and welcome to JRI.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation cooperative agreement #0937591 and grants #0849101 and #1257246. The findings and observations contained in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.