Want, settle, get

Do you know the game, “Want, Settle, Get”?

I did not until my wife, who is trained as an actor, introduced me to it. A conceptual game somewhat like “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”, it tests your knowledge of film, but it also tests your critical sensibilities about the skill and profession of acting. In “Want, Settle, Get”, you imagine yourself casting a feature film, thinking:

What actor do I really want?

What actor would I settle for?

What actor do I really get?

An example might be: Want: Laurence Olivier. Settle: William Hurt. Get: William Shatner.

That is not to say that there is anything wrong with William Shatner, per se. The film still might earn some money. But it is not going to Cannes, and it certainly will not earn you any laurels.

I often think our innovation system operates this way as well. I am not talking about why, after more than 40 years since we last did it, we can no longer put a person on the moon, or why we have not gone to Mars, or why we are not commuting in flying cars. It is not about our inability to make investments and take risks.

Instead, I am talking about our inability to apply our critical sensibilities to the innovation system and articulate what we really want out of it, so we have a real chance of not merely settling, or suffering, with what we get.

We want our innovations to do good in the world, not just economically but socially. We settle for whatever an ad hoc innovation system gives us.

We get innovations that too often reproduce the power structures that created them and create a need to be filled, rather than address an extant need.

Responsible innovation (RI) gives us a way to think about extracting ourselves from the lower rungs of “settle” or “get” and keeps us focused on the higher aspiration of what we truly want from innovation. Part of that focus is institutional – how to define and design RI such that it interacts productively with the innovation system. Part of that focus is normative – just what do we think responsibility is, what kind of characteristics of innovation are preferable to what other kinds, and what needs, problems and conditions deserve attention through innovation in the first place.

The articles in this volume 2 issue 1 of the Journal of Responsible Innovation provide some help.

Addressing the institutional focus, de Saille (2015) traces how the European Union (EU), perhaps the most visible proponent of RI globally, decided to use RI to help express what it wanted out of innovation. While the term had been in use for years, de Saille traces its influence on the EU to an expert workshop, held in May 2011, by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. After an exhaustive search of documents, de Saille conducts a discourse analysis of the small but crucial sample through which she documents a “gradual intensification of funding for research on informing, communicating with, and otherwise ‘engaging’ the public” (155), beginning with the Sixth Framework Programme in 2002. Attention to emerging technologies like nanotechnology raised the profile of public engagement further, and eventually responsible research and innovation (RRI) became not only an opportunity through which to express European values but, potentially, “a European value in and of itself” (157). The promotion of RRI however, raised several tensions in its implementation, not the least of which was one between the moral responsibility of innovation and its economic contribution.

The potential conflict between moral responsibility and economic contribution – derivative in a way from underlying theories of deontological and utilitarian views, respectively – plays out in the next two articles in the issue, which also take on the normative focus. Articles by Schroeder and Ladikas (2015) and Ziegler (2015) each take American political theorist John Rawls' Theory of Justice as a starting point for articulating the values appropriate to RI. Rawls' theory tries to accommodate both deontological and utilitarian perspectives, yielding his principles of justice, most famously the difference principle, which holds that inequalities can only be justified by the extent to which they help the least well-off in society.

Schroeder and Ladikas (2015, 170) proceed from assumptions, close to axiomatic among the RI community, that not only should research be conducted responsibly, but to do so it should focus on “socially beneficial targets” and “promote and not hinder social justice”. The authors not only defend these assumptions, but they also adopt and adapt the difference principle as a way to operationalize them. While noting opponents to using any principles as decision-tools (Holbrook and Briggle 2014), Schroeder and Ladikas nevertheless argue that the difference principle is “a good candidate for an operational funding criterion based on a fundamental value, that of justice” (179). Their application of the principle to funding takes the form that the tie-breaker between equally ranked funding proposals should be an assessment of which of the projects is more likely to benefit the least well-off.

Taking a slightly different tack, Ziegler explores the roles that innovation plays in a Rawlsian conception of justice, namely, by contributing to the long-term stability of society and providing opportunities to address the status of the least advantaged in society. Ziegler engages Rawls critically over the role of innovation, making the point – perhaps relevant to Schroeder and Ladikas – that “Rawls' focus on primary goods of income and wealth for distributive justice evaluation is a very restricted vocabulary for the assessment of impact” (Ziegler 2015, 188; think sustainability). Ziegler continues to expand on his notion of the “fair space for innovation”, showing not only that innovation is broader than the role of the entrepreneur in the market, but that it is also the consequence of state and investor action and non-market interactions, and in turn that the ramifications of innovation are broader than wealth and income and need to be accounted for in a fuller theory of justice applicable to RI.

These approaches to helping define what we want out of innovation – through articulating a geographically bound set of values or a more transcendent principle for the just and thus responsible role of the state in innovation – work on the anticipatory side of the ledger. In the final research article in this issue, Mampuys and Brom (2015) work on the responsive side. They focus on what they call “alarming studies”, those pieces of research that raise the alarm on innovations that have already been broadly taken up or adopted, for example, genetically modified (GM) crops. Examining how European governments respond to the publication of such alarming studies, Mampuys and Brom demonstrate how governments fail to account for the insufficiency of science to settle all the important questions surrounding innovations like GM crops, thus leading to open-ended conflicts. They recommend that governments do a better, more systematic job monitoring research to head off the surprising element of alarming studies, communicating a response to alarming studies that their full assessment cannot be arrived at immediately, broadening any such assessment beyond mere delegation to an authoritative scientific advisory body, and including attempts for improved replications of the alarming study. Such efforts might either help us feel better about those innovations we have settled for, or substitute other innovations that, with more information, we decide we want more.

In addition to these four research articles, this issue contains one piece of pedagogy and two reviews. In pedagogy, Eggleson and Berry (2015) examine a non-classroom intervention seeking to improve faculty and graduate student understanding of and sensitivity toward macroethical issues in human enhancement. In the intervention, the 26 internationally diverse participants watched as a group the documentary Fixed: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement, reviewed in this journal by de Saille (2014). Researchers administered a pre-test to the participants, asking them questions about their feelings about therapies and human enhancements, and then they immediately screened the film. They administered the post-test one day later. Eggleson and Berry report striking shifts from participants' initial positions post-test, suggesting that the documentary was evocative and ambiguous in its positioning.

The two reviews in this volume address recently published, multi-authored volumes: Hankins (2015) reviews Innovation and Responsibility: Engaging with New and Emerging Technologies, the fifth and most recent collection of papers from the annual meetings of the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies – this one held in Boston, USA, in 2013 – and Hankins includes in his review reflections on where the current volume stands with respect to the third and fourth volumes. Finally, Čeičytė (2015) reviews Responsible Innovation in South East Europe Countries, a collection of research-based chapters edited by Norbert Buzas and Miklos Lukovics from the University of Szeged, Hungary. Čeičytė finds much to recommend in the depth and currency of the research presented, which addresses not only the concept of RI but applications in such diverse areas as finance, food, and energy.

That the RI community is engaged in such work as related in this issue – grappling with high level European policy, bringing RI to canonical theorists, understanding how governments react to alarms and scholars react to artistic takes on RI, and finding evidence in the literature for a progressive scholarly agenda – makes me hopeful that we are avoiding the traps of “settle” and “get” for RI, and that we may be creating the community of scholarship and influence we want.