Editorial introduction: questioning inclusion in business, policy, and public values

While much of the scholarship on Responsible Innovation (RI) and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has focused on work being done in university environments, this issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation brings together research inquiries into RI activities as they pertain to private, governmental, and civil society sectors, respectively. Such a diverse and interdisciplinary set of offerings befits the aspirational breadth of RI, which strives to take into account all ‘helices’ (Carayannis and Campbell 2009; Leydesdorff 2012) of an innovation system.

In the first research article of the issue, Brand and Blok (2019) reflect critically on the suitability of deliberative engagement with stakeholders and wider publics – one of the main procedural dimensions associated with RI and RRI – as a means of advancing RI within business contexts. Others have explored prospects for enhancing reflexivity, responsiveness, and anticipation in corporate and industrial settings (e.g. Asante, Owen, and Williamson 2014; Flipse, van der Sanden, and Osseweijer 2014; Iatridis and Schroeder 2016; Stahl et al. 2017), here, the authors focus on inclusion in the private sector. More specifically, Brand and Blok contrast deliberative engagement with core tenets of doing business in a context dominated by free market ideals and animated by the pursuit of innovative capacity, competitive advantage, and related commitments. In the process, they outline three significant sources of friction that potentially thwart participatory approaches to RI in business, namely, tensions between deliberation and innovation, transparency and competition, and inclusiveness and corporate governance. The authors also find these tensions to be present to varying degrees in their analysis of three markedly different theoretical approaches to business ethics (market failure, stakeholder theory, and political Corporate Social Responsibility). Provocatively, Brand and Blok call for a more “effective framework of RI in business” (p. 19) more generally, thus setting the stage for a broader discussion of how RI scholars and practitioners interested in deliberative engagement should navigate between the extremes of relinquishing their ideals in the business context on the one hand, and working towards structural change on the other.

In marked contrast, business actors play a noticeably different role with respect to the element of inclusion in the second research article. Shifting our attention to policy conceptions of civil society’s role in research and innovation, Ahrweiler et al. (2019) first establish that European policy makers have largely delegated responsibility for representing public perspectives in funded projects to Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), conceiving of them as the “main advocates” for RRI in such settings. In their examination of some 200 projects, however, the authors discover a much more complex picture of research and innovation actor interactions and competencies than that painted by policy documents. For instance, CSOs are found to offer considerably more diverse forms of value than are typically appreciated in official representations; at the same time, CSOs play a much less active role than other actors – notably, business actors – in promoting all the various procedural dimensions of RRI studied. In all, the authors take what they find to be the participation of multiple actor groups as evidence for the success of the European RRI endeavor, insofar as it suggests a distribution of RRI capacities across sectors.

While Ahrweiler et al. (2019) note the importance of civil society in policy efforts aimed at responsibly governing emerging technologies, the third research article examines an overlooked phenomenon in public opinion research, namely, the influence that decidedly controversial technologies may have on public views towards emerging ones. Asking whether beliefs (among United States respondents) about genetically modified organisms correlate to judgments towards labeling products enhanced by nanotechnology, Akin et al. (2019) explore an under-examined factor in public attitude formation towards knowledge-based technological innovation. In the process, they find preliminary evidence of a “technology spillover effect” (p. 66, 67). As the authors suggest, their finding that “individuals may use cues from [one] technology to determine their attitude towards [another]” (p. 66) holds implications for the responsible representation of public values in regulatory efforts, participatory exercises aimed at inclusion, as well as public opinion research. In short, their work calls for more careful attention to potentially measurable divergences in, and interactions among, public views towards technological risk and benefit, deference to scientific authority, and interest in media accounts – especially in cases where underrepresented publics may lack “voice” (cf. Brand and Block 2019).

One of the ways that research policy makers throughout the industrialized world currently attempt to account for public views and values in research and innovation programs is through the – in some cases, increasing – use of evaluative metrics. This issue of JRI contains a special section on the responsible use of metrics. In this collection of perspectives, Donovan (2017), Holbrook (2017), Briggle (2017), and Frodeman (2018) tackle issues of societal impact, research management, and sleight of hand tactics within policy justifications for metrics. For a detailed overview of these four provocative pieces, readers are encouraged to consult the introduction to this special section by Holbrook (2018).

In addition to perspectives, JRI publishes several unique types of offerings beyond the research article. In their pedagogy piece, Richter, Hale, and Archambault (2019) maintain that the principles and practices of RI can be productively included both in the use of and training about innovation in higher education classrooms and teacher preparation. The authors detail two instantiations of a hybrid learning model they developed at Arizona State University, in which they creatively combine thematic content pertaining to RI, sustainability science, and access to STEM educational materials.

In his review piece, Hankins (2019) describes the structure of an online course devoted to RI offered by the Technical University of Delft, offering an assessment of the experience both from the perspective of a student and a long-time advocate of RI. Noting that the course targets engineers and technical experts, and that course participants are drawn from a wide variety of geographical locations, Hankins finds reason to regard the course as an effective instrument for sowing seeds of “design thinking in RI,” even as he points to the need for institutions of higher education, policy makers, and the wider RI community to continue to cultivate such promising beginnings.

Finally, Lai (2019) reviews Parthasarathy’s Patent Politics: life forms, markets, and the public interest in the United States and Europe (2017). In the book, Parthasarathy develops a compelling explanation for the different ways in which American and European patent institutions differently interact with the social, cultural, and economic landscapes within which they are situated and which they seek to make or shape, respectively. Lie’s review provides a clear and useful summary and raises a number of modest issues from the standpoint of legal scholarship. Overall, Lie finds the book to be timely and well-written as it “competently and seamlessly deals with the complex issues surrounding the patenting of life forms” (p 109) in such a way that is accessible both to scholars not versed in the law as well as to practitioners outside of the academy.