Navigating responsible innovation

Welcome, reader, to the third volume of the Journal of Responsible Innovation.

As the new Editor-in-Chief, it is a remarkable time to be taking on this role. With efforts proliferating locally, nationally, and internationally to make good on core – if still contested – concepts associated with responsible innovation, the academic community is in a position not only to debate but also to influence their development and application.

To that end, and as promised in its inaugural editorial, the Journal of Responsible Innovation has during its first two years provided a platform for this community to articulate and discuss many of the pressing questions surrounding responsible innovation (Guston et al. 2014). Constructing this platform, however, has required dedication and hard work on the part of the journal’s authors, its reviewers, and its editorial staff. Above all, founding – and now emeritus – Editor-in-Chief, David H. Guston, deserves recognition for his tireless work in charting a stable and productive course for the journal. Happily, Guston will remain engaged in efforts aimed at responsible innovation, especially as he sees into its second year a major university undertaking in that area (see International Innovation 2015).

Of course, responsible innovation holds implications not only for how universities operate and are structured, but also for actors and institutions within industry, civil society, and public policy. As readers of this journal will know, national and regional funding organizations, councils, commissions, committees, and even legislatures have recommended and prescribed activities for responsible innovation (Fisher et al. 2015; Guston 2014; Owen 2014; de Saille 2015; van Oudheusden 2014). Most recently, in April of this year, the Research Council of Norway (RCN) adopted an explicit framework for Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). According to the framework, RRI requires “the active participation of all relevant stakeholders” in order for research and innovation to be both inclusive of and responsive to a wide range of diverse values and voices (RCN 2016).

Like much of the policy discourse surrounding responsible innovation, such language is striking in comparison to traditional science and technology policy models and mechanisms. At the same time, it raises critical questions: Who are the relevant stakeholders? What counts as their active participation? A few weeks after the RCN’s framework was announced, the Norwegian Ethical, Legal, and Social Aspects research community held their bi-annual meeting on board a storied Hurtigruta passenger ship. As the party wound its way along the Western coast, through the Lofoten Islands, and north of the Arctic circle, how to study responsible innovation was a central theme in the discussions. Reflecting on the challenges of conducting research into something whose intellectual and normative foundations are still open to interpretation, some called for more specific guidelines for implementing and evaluating RRI, while others saw this as too constraining and premature. This debate, in turn, led still others to suggest that those involved in it were “in the same boat” since critical scholarly inquiry into RRI cannot easily be separated from its eventual institutionalization.

The contents of the Journal of Responsible Innovation volume three, issue one, navigate the banks and shoals, inlets and open waters of responsible innovation. In particular, the five contributions, both individually and as a whole, demonstrate attentiveness to balancing inclusiveness with responsiveness and do so across a range of actor groups beginning with publics, then moving to various combinations of experts and practitioners, and closing with industrial firms.

In the first of three research papers, Groves et al. (2016) explore what everyday practices in family and community settings reveal about the ways in which people live intimately with energy technologies. Drawing upon biographical material and the reactions of diversified groups of citizens to mainstream cultural depictions of future technologies, they offer a rich sense of the subjective investments people make in “the material infrastructure of everyday life.” In the process, Groves et al. (2016) question dominant imaginaries of smartness and convenience that guide much technological development in light of the grittier aesthetic and emotional practices that emerge from their findings and that suggest alterative values and, by implication, alternative future imaginaries. Ultimately, they hold out the possibility that more nuanced attention to what matters to people can lead to more inclusive forms of technology assessment, public deliberation, and technological futures.

De Jong, Kupper, and Broerse (2016) also look into inclusiveness, this time in the context of early stage stakeholder engagement around emerging technologies. Taking the case of neuroimaging, they orchestrate a series of multi-stakeholder interactions among diverse practitioners that include neuroscientists and security professionals, among others, and that are designed to explore possibilities for producing common yet “responsible” imaginaries in the absence of concrete applications. Evaluating the interactions, they document instances of enhanced reflexivity as well as a case of practitioner responsiveness. More specifically, they find that the problem definition for neuroimaging applications was significantly changed as a result of the interactions, which also stressed social desirability, tempered inflated expectations, and discouraged anti-democratic practices of discrimination. Although the interactions were productive, de Jong et al. (2016) note that in the absence of sustained interactions, such common imaginaries among experts and practitioners are likely to evaporate.

While the previous two papers seek to enrich crucial aspects of the process of responsible innovation, the third, by Thorstensen and Forsberg (2016), shifts attention to its product side. Attempting to forge connections between the field of responsible innovation and that of sustainability, they consider the potential for social life cycle assessment to address the problem of “responsibility gaps,” in which complex innovation dynamics and the involvement of many hands can make it extremely difficult to legitimately specify where responsibility lies. With careful attention to underlying conceptual logic, Thorstensen and Forsberg argue that because of their focus on final products and on value-chains, social life cycle assessments can serve to more precisely locate discrete clusters of relevant actors and thus – although this is more challenging in the case of emerging technologies – can afford new opportunities to both understand and perform instances of responsibility and responsiveness where they can seem to be most elusive.

Rounding out the issue is a pair of perspectives. The first, by Balmer et al. (2016), offers guidance for collaborations between natural and social scientists. The perspective is based on the extensive experience of its ten co-authors, primarily in the area of synthetic biology. While socio-technical collaborations can take a variety of distinct approaches to responsible innovation (Fisher et al. 2015), Balmer et al. (2016) look behind the scenes in order to shed light on the “everyday struggles” that they can entail. In the process, they offer five practical principles, or rules of thumb. Among these are the importance of taking risks in a context that is infused by power asymmetries and vulnerabilities, and the need to attend simultaneously to the broader normative considerations that motivate such collaborations as well as to the ones that permeate the collaboration itself. Balmer et al. (2016) term the latter principle “the double movement of ethics.”

Finally, Hemphill (2016) cautions against forging links between corporate social responsibility and responsible innovation, as suggested by Valdivia and Guston (2015). Arguing that corporate social responsibility is “easily manipulated and lacking in value,” Hemphill proposes corporate citizenship as a more promising approach for including industrial actors within the scope of responsible innovation. Corporate citizenship is, in Hemphill’s view, more potent and more practical, largely because is it based on extensive observation of corporate behavior. Undergirding this point, Hemphill reproduces Mervin and Googin’s (2006) progressive model of the stages of corporate citizenship, in which firms were found to engage in “increasingly complex and sophisticated” behaviors as they successively embrace the concept.

As the contents of the issue show – whether in revealing alternative imaginaries among publics, facilitating their emergence among practitioners, or attending to the ethics of how collaborations address ethics – navigating responsible innovation requires addressing its normative, conceptual and practical dimensions while resisting counterproductive dichotomies – social/technical, structure/agent, interpretation/implementation – so as to inform emerging agendas for funding, conducting, and evaluating knowledge-based innovation in the context of social and public values.