Framings and frameworks of responsible innovation

This issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation rounds out Volume 3 by focusing on applications and assessments of various responsible innovation frameworks. It echoes themes raised in the first two issues, in particular the challenge of implementation that often requires navigating among conflicting constructs (Fisher 2016a) as well as that of translating abstract ideals into a plurality of diverse settings (Fisher 2016b). While diverging in their questionings of certain framings of responsibility and in the adjustments they would make thereto, the contributors to all three issues share in the search for leveraging more socially and ecologically responsible innovation.

In the first of the current issue’s three research articles, Demers-Payette, Lehoux, and Daudelin (2016) analyze cross-sectional stakeholder dialogues in order to investigate what responsible medical innovation would mean from a healthcare systems perspective. Noting that responsibility historically has been institutionalized through a range of healthcare regulatory structures and practices, the authors nevertheless find that ‘health laws and policies idealize values that are rarely if ever fully implemented in practice’. They also show how applying the concepts of anticipation, inclusiveness, reflexivity and responsiveness reveals shortcomings and hence opportunities for enhancing what counts as responsibility in technology production, technology assessment and across groups with diverging values. Applying this framework to the specific context of a Canadian healthcare system not only reveals possibilities for informing responsible medical innovation, but also for tailoring and further developing the framework itself.

As in the first article, Foley, Bernstein, and Wiek (2016) apply familiar dimensions of responsible innovation to a specific context – in this case, interviews with nanotechnology innovation actors in Phoenix, Arizona – but only after first modifying these dimensions using principles drawn from sustainability science and adaptive management. Whereas their work is thus in league with that of others who have sought to bring responsible innovation and sustainability into closer connection with one another (e.g. Thorstensen and Forsberg 2016; Wender et al. 2014; cf. Stirling 2016), their approach seeks to reduce what they see as overly burdensome stakeholder deliberations and hopes to encourage more intentional rather than reactive forms of innovation governance – as reflected in their preference for the concept of ‘adaptation’ over that of ‘responsiveness’. The authors then use the amended framework to compare its prescriptions for responsibility with the perceived responsibilities of stakeholders.

In the final research article, Pellé (2016) surveys a range of approaches to responsible innovation in order to map the prevailing interpretations of responsibility that have been invoked in recent years, both by scholars and practitioners. Noting that approaches to responsible innovation tend to agree on basic principles, such as inclusiveness, they are nevertheless based on ‘markedly different justifications’. This, however, is a preliminary step to her principal topic of inquiry, which asks how each justification navigates the tension between ‘on the one hand, the need for a pluralist assessment of responsibility and, on the other, the constraints imposed by the practical implementation of norms’. In addition to the familiar distinction between more procedural versus more consequentialist approaches, Pellé identifies a third variety, that of virtue and care ethics. In exploring how each of these normative strategies adjusts to the tensions between moral pluralism and practical applicability, she concludes by asking which one appears best equipped to do so in a robust manner.

The second group of articles revolves around the application of responsible innovation to the pace of innovation. As readers will recall (Guston et al. 2014), JRI invites discussion papers that are then openly reviewed by a handful of commissioned pieces. In his discussion paper, Vogt (2016) points to the overlooked parameter of time in innovation processes, proposing that mechanisms for slowing the pace of innovation, while controversial and unlikely to be adopted at present, ought nevertheless to be explored. In responding to Vogt, Kay (2016), Woodhouse (2016) and Stirling (2016) offer varyingly critical views on the means, prospects and wisdom of seeking to regulate the speed of innovation in light of demand for responsible innovation. Kay agrees with much of Vogt’s analysis, but questions the analytical purchase of treating time as a parameter, calling instead for innovations in governance. Woodhouse, reflecting on the absence of scholarly attention to the pace of technological change despite its colossal significance, offers a number of gritty observations drawn from the ‘incontrovertible fact that trial-and-error learning is much more difficult when change is rapid’. Lastly, Stirling questions framing the governance of innovation in terms of speed, pointing instead to a more fundamental issue and reminding readers of prior frameworks for innovation governance that any effort aimed at responsible innovation cannot afford to neglect.

The issue concludes with two perspectives. Macnaghten (2016) reviews the work of approximately two-dozen researchers who analyze debates over genetically modified agricultural innovation in three settings in the Global South (see Macnaghten and Carro-Ripalda 2015). In the process of summarizing their findings, including their analysis of the lack of institutional responsiveness (a finding reminiscent of Anzaldo Montoya and Chauvet 2016; de Hoop, Pols, and Romijn 2016; di Giulio et al. 2016), Macnaghten presents a case for responsible innovation as an ‘alternative pluralistic and inclusive model for decision-making’ that should be consciously brought to bear on not only emerging but also existing technological trajectories.

Finally, Rip (2016) reports on an expert advisory group that constituted part of the European Commission’s enactment of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). Recurring questions over the meaning of RRI that emerged from the group became an occasion for Rip, first as committee chair, to circulate a memo on the ‘curious’ situation (reproduced in one of three appendices) and then, as author of the current perspective, to muse over the increasing institutionalization of RRI despite, or perhaps because of, its very open-endedness. Rip’s diagnosis serves as a timely reminder that framings and hence frameworks emerge, at least in part, out of larger and longer term developments.