Mission impossible? Developing responsible innovation in a global context

For responsible innovation to have lasting and widely felt social value, scholars and practitioners alike must not shy away from the challenges that its more ambitious normative commitments unavoidably entail. As the contents of this issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation make clear, recent scholarship is taking up this task by scrutinizing the barriers to responsible innovation even while seeking to extend it into new empirical and theoretical domains. Moving successively from local, national and finally international scales, the four research papers in this issue contribute – both individually and as a whole – to the theme of developing responsible innovation in a global context.

Critical of efforts to guide innovation projects and policies by using generalizable definitions of social needs and priorities, Di Giulio et al. (2016) show in the first paper how such “abstract universals” not only fail to do justice to the local conditions they ostensibly seek to improve, but can actually undermine them. The authors do this by analyzing the interplay of identity, attachment and vulnerability in cases of community relocation, infrastructure development and energy use in both BRIC and UK settings. In the process, they propose an alternative strategy of differentiation that would use “concrete universals” – standards that more accurately reflect the viewpoints of a range of actors and that can more effectively link inclusiveness and responsiveness in projects aimed at responsible innovation – even while acknowledging the complex challenges that such sensitivity to local contexts can in turn reveal.

Like the first paper, de Hoop, Pols, and Romijn (2016) expose some of the disconcerting barriers that attempts to innovate responsibly may oftentimes face. Concerned that frameworks for responsible innovation not be “hollowed out” or used to disguise inauspicious projects, however, the second paper stresses that awareness of its limitations can help guide responsible innovation in this respect. Examining a vigorous attempt to promote biofuel innovation in India, the authors seek to open inquiry into the factors that limit responsible innovation and that allow innovation to become irresponsible, examining both project and policy levels. Posing a practical and theoretical question, namely, how to determine when a lack of capacity renders responsible innovation “difficult if not impossible,” they also explore the conditions under which relinquishment of an innovation project may at times constitute a viable option.

Recognizing that institutional structures can undermine responsibility at more local levels, Anzaldo Montoya and Chauvet (2016) explore obstacles to responsible innovation in the case of standard setting for nanotechnology in Mexico. Treating standard setting as an instrument of governance, they suggest that a lack of capacity at the national level, coupled with dependency on an international regime that favors commercialization over risk management, leads to “subordinated governance” in which global standards that may be poorly suited to local needs and conditions are nevertheless accepted in the absence of political will and public capabilities to design and enact their own.

The final paper shifts the theoretical focus from local and national contexts to the global level. Reminding readers of the distributed nature of science and innovation, Wong (2016) notes that responsibility will mean different things depending upon diverse actor configurations and their varied sets of underlying values. Anticipating that its purported Western bias “will be one of the major challenges to [responsible innovation] if it is to have a global significance,” Pak argues that, to the extent that the normative foundations of responsible innovation are based in liberal democratic values, this poses a dilemma for politically legitimate yet non-liberal societies such as China in their quests to develop frameworks for innovating responsibly. Pak concludes by calling for efforts to “include other normative traditions in the creation of international standards” for responsible innovation.

The theme present in these research papers is reinforced by a perspective piece as well as by two book reviews.

Taking up the integration of diverse data sets and information architectures in large-scale and wide-ranging health initiatives, Winickoff, Jamal, and Anderson (2016) note that such “big data” endeavors will depend for their success in part on how well policy makers and medical researchers address key social and ethical challenges. They argue that disruptive technologies such as crowdsourcing and social networking offer “promising avenues of responsible innovation” for pursuing equitable access, facilitating collectivized informed consent, and earning public trust – provided that policy makers do not lose sight of the democratic visions that motivate the use of these technologies for public engagement.

In the first of two book reviews, Himmelsbach (2016) playfully employs the 1954 film Godzilla as a productive metaphor, unpacking the argument in Stilgoe’s elegant and informed treatment of geoengineering as a social experiment in Experiment Earth: Responsible Innovation in Geoengineering (2015). Finally, in his review of Klüver, Nielsen, and Jørgensen’s (2016) Policy-Oriented Technology Assessment Across Europe: Expanding Capacities, Valkenburg (2016) finds this output of the Parliaments and Civil Society in Technology Assessment (PACITA) project to be laudable in its scope and ambitions, even if it misses key insights from science studies and from recent developments in responsible innovation.

As readers will see, the challenge of developing approaches to responsible innovation that acknowledge the role of innovation actors and institutions as agents of social, moral and political change – and that are effective within a variety of local and global contexts – are clearly formidable. At the same time, the contents of this issue of JRI provide fruitful starting points for progressing the at times seemingly impossible ideals of responsible innovation.