International handbook on responsible innovation. A global resource

The International Handbook on Responsible Innovation. A Global Resource (René von Schomberg and Jonathan Hankins, eds., Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) offers a synoptic account of a field that seeks to breach the walls between academia and society. The volume is substantial – some 600 pages – and consists of two introductory essays and 36 chapters, divided into five topical domains: concepts, global challenges, emerging technologies, regional practices, and interviews. It is impossible to review all of this within a brief compass. Therefore, in what follows I emphasize the history and importance of the topic, identify a few central themes, dip into a few essays, and pose a couple challenges to the volume and to field in general.

Responsible innovation today is part of a larger democracy movement within science and culture at large. At first glance the book can look like a case of putting old wine into new bottles, stepping onto the well-trod ground of attempts to restrain laissez faire capitalism from damaging society. More generally still, the Handbook is another entry in societal efforts to construct institutions that check self-interest for the common good. The essay by Owen and Pensera note that concerns with responsible innovation extend back several decades, but these issues reach much further back than that. In the Republic Socrates proposed to restrain self-dealing through education, in the early eighteenth century Mandeville sought to turn self-interest to the common good (‘private vices, public virtues’), and later that century the Founding Fathers of the US Constitution devised a set of checks and balances to constrain amour propre.

But there is more to say in favor of this volume than to point to its continuity with past thinking. When Plato (more exactly, Juvenal) asked who guards the guardians, he was questioning whether any group can be trusted to look past its own interests for the common good. This has become a pressing question concerning the scientific community's relation to society. There's a growing consensus across the political spectrum that the older assumption that the scientific community can be left to police itself (e.g. on the Vannevar Bush model, via peer review) is inadequate. The 1997 introduction of the Broader Impacts criterion as part of the review process at the US National Science Foundation is merely one among a number of prominent manifestations of this concern.

These age-old questions have taken on a new color because the balance has shifted: where once concerns focused on the dangers of capitalism, now our anxieties increasingly fix upon the ever-accelerating rates of technoscientific innovation. The stakes may be exceedingly high. Any number of new technologies – the list includes nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, genetic engineering, and much more – could lead to our living out the nightmares of Orwell or Huxley, or even, at the outside, to the destruction of the human race. If thinkers like Steve Fuller promote the proactionary – where technoscience leaps forward, and only looks afterward – von Schomberg and similar voices offer a defense that is precautionary in nature. A society that embraces the gee-whiz of technological advance needs a countervailing effort at confronting the risks and democratizing the process of research and innovation.

Von Schomberg's introductory essay does a fine job of table-setting for the discussions to come. He identifies six deficits in the current global research and innovation system that he sees as obstacles to bringing about desirable societal outcomes. The first deficit consists of an exclusive governmental focus on negative outcomes – risks – rather than also seeking to steer innovation toward positive outcomes. (This asymmetry, of course, reflects that it is much easier to achieve consensus about what we don't want to happen as compared to what we do.) The second is the well-known issue of market failure, where development is retarded in areas that show low potential for profit; and the third highlights the failure to align innovation strategies with larger societal goals (de facto, a call for ‘industrial policy’).

The fourth deficit concerns the need to integrate the evaluation of innovation throughout the entire innovation process, upstream, midstream, and downstream, by including principles like anticipatory governance and values such as sustainability. The fifth deficit describes efforts at promoting Open Science and Open Source, and the sixth calls for foresight practices and impact assessments. It's notable that while responsible innovation attempts to restrain technological development, its own approach to doing so could be seen as quite technocratic in orientation. Meanwhile, in America and elsewhere some circles will dismiss such efforts as ‘creeping socialism’. If by socialism they mean that responsible innovation is part of a long line of attempts to make profit-taking more responsive to societal needs, then broadly speaking, they will be correct.

The point about the technocratic orientation of RI (or RRI) deserves further elaboration. The term ‘humanities’ is scattered throughout the volume (see especially the Fisher essay), but it most commonly consists of the linked phrase ‘the social sciences and humanities’. There is little recognition that the humanities are, or should be, a radically different set of fields from the social sciences, with a history more rooted in asking questions than in providing answers and expertise (Frodeman 2019). The field of RI and this volume both fully recognize the existence of an ‘ethics and values’ dimension to innovation. What is largely lacking, however, is a sense that the solution to societal problems connected to innovation may now need to involve philosophical elements such as self-control and character development (e.g. what the Germans call Bildung) as well as social technique.

I conclude with a few words of overall assessment. The volume is not as clear as one might hope on its understanding of the relation between two core terms: responsible innovation (RI), versus responsible research and innovation (RRI). The field is often designated by the latter, while the title speaks only of the former. Some essays read as if responsible research is encompassed by responsible innovation; in others, the two concepts seem to be held apart, or one of the two is ignored altogether. All of these stances can be argued for, especially as contexts and interests shift, and various pieces (e.g. the essays by Owen and Pensura, by Gianni, and by Özdemir) approach these questions from different angles. But a discussion of this problematic in the opening essays would have been salutary, as part of constructing a common template for what is to come.

This would be helpful because of the long history of shielding the creative processes of discovery and invention from the implementation and use of these discoveries. The NSF's Broader Impacts criterion highlights the fault lines: by including it within the merit review of funding proposals (coupled with ‘intellectual merit’) the NSF is recognizing the ties between responsible research and responsible innovation. The difficulty of follow-through is shown by the fact that the broader impacts requirement has ended up being a call for the identification of positive impacts. There is no requirement for the proposer to discuss the possible negative impacts or ‘grimpacts’ of their research.

Finally, I also would have liked to have seen a stronger critique of the idea that we need innovation at all, what Godin and Vinck (2017) have called no-vation. The Soete essay raises this issue, but the essay begins with the premise that ‘“innovation will be just like technology: it is the use one makes of the innovation which will determine the benefits or costs to society’ – setting aside the more fundamental question of whether innovation can be destructive even in its so-called ‘benign’ aspects (e.g. cultural lag, promoting the backlash of fundamentalism, etc.) and the premise that innovation is also shaped by society. Like the question of the relation between RRI and RI, the question of the value innovation strikes this reader as a fundamental theme that could have been dealt with across the volume. But perhaps, as with the comments above concerning the humanities, I am getting beyond the current parameters of the Overton Window, raising questions that are too radical to be advanced today.