Learning from failure

This issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation brings readers along a multi-level arc of governance sites that engages with academic ‘cultures of disengagement’ (Cech 2014), introduces an anticipatory application of Intelligent Trial and Error (ITE) for strategic assessment of technology development, and compares responsible innovation policy adoption across diverse national contexts.

In the first research article, Holloway and Herder (2019) investigate understandings and experiences of commercialization among emerging and established biomedical researchers based on interviews conducted at a small Canadian university. They find increasing ‘disengagement from the details of commercialization’ among these researchers, locating this pattern within what they see as a larger historical trend. While commercialization of academic science is a widely adopted and readily available means of registering the societal relevance of research, it is also controversial. Furthermore, pressures to commercialize may foreclose alternative conceptions of how science and technology can be responsive to public values. Rather than encountering evidence of robust discussion and debate among the scientists they studied, however, the authors find that ‘even those who harbor reservations vis-à-vis the commercialization of academic science, tend to reproduce rather than question it.’ Moreover, the authors find that while most researchers express a ‘considerable amount of ambivalence’ towards commercialization, graduate students and postdocs are less likely than their more established mentors to ‘wrestle with the tensions of commercialization.’ In the process, internalization of commercialization pressures is leading to ‘the conflation of profit and the public interest,’ especially among emerging scientists. Holloway and Herder voice a concern that such disengagement may ‘undermine future generations of biomedical researchers’ capacity to engage in informed debate about commercialization and its practices.’ To counter this potentially deepening learned incapacity, the authors call for supporting ‘open and explicit debate with and amongst scientists about the advantages and disadvantages of commercialization for the public interest.’

Setting out to observe laboratory-based engineering team practices of ethical reflection and decision-making, Lee et al. (2019) in the second research article lament their finding that ‘voluntary ethics discussions rarely occurred in the lab. In documenting and reflecting upon their ‘failed research project,’ however, the authors chart a course of productive disillusionment and offer up an intriguing metaphor: explicit ethical reflection in their field site was for them ‘like a rare, shy species of bird, hard to spot, requiring methods to flush it out of hiding or attract it.’ The authors then experiment with socio-technical integration approaches, softening interventive edges, however, in hopes of retaining their role as observers. This too yields limited success. Lee et al.’s experience underscores what appears to be a failing to promote ethics as an ‘engineering habit of mind’ despite its lofty institutional endorsement. Their experience may also tell us as much about social scientific identities as about the cultural constraints on engineering practice. Fittingly the authors close by emphasizing the need to reappraise two ‘unworkable’ yet closely related divisions of practice: that between engineering laboratory activities and explicit ethical deliberation, and that between social scientific observation and its interventive edges.

Dotson (2019) shifts us to the strategic analysis of an emerging technology, introducing a modified version of Intelligent Trial and Error (ITE), which he adapts as a ‘forward looking strategic framework for enabling RRI’ (Responsible Research and Innovation). Of the various inspirations, neighbors, and predecessors of responsible innovation – e.g. technology assessment (van Lente, Swierstra, and Joly 2017), sustainable development (Stirling 2016), appropriate technology (Hartley et al. 2019) – ITE has received less recognition and attention (cf. Woodhouse 2016). As the author explains, ‘intelligent’ refers to the idea that incremental, pluralistic, decentralized interactions among partisan groups in a democratic context are more conducive to learning and adjustment than are expert-led approaches. ITE thus aims ‘to uncover sociotechnical system characteristics that may hinder learning, preventing quicker feedback on harms, reduced damage wrought by errors that do occur, and better responses to unexpected consequences.’ Dotson applies his anticipatory form of ITE to strategically analyze the sociotechnical landscape of technological development around ‘produced waters,’ water that results from processes of oil and gas extraction, using the case of Kern County, CA. Asking what ‘strategies would help ensure that produced water recycling innovation proceeds responsibly?,’ Dotson finds key conditions for responsible innovation to be lacking. He identifies a series of technical, cultural, and political barriers and recommends strategies to address them in order to promote RRI pillars such as reflexivity and responsiveness in the case considered. Noting that ITE has ‘much to offer RRI,’ Doston synthesizes his treatment of their overlaps and differences and he advocates for adding incrementalism and pluralism to the pillars of responsible innovation.

This issue of JRI includes a special section of seven perspective articles, each one detailing a particular instantiation of ‘the increasingly global concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)’ (Doezema et al. 2019). Indeed, in comparison with the well-known ‘ELSI funding arena’ that was introduced in 1994 (Zwart, Landeweerd, and van Rooij 2014), RRI has experienced a remarkably swift and broad-based dissemination that policy makers may wish to take note of at this pivotal and potentially post-European RRI moment.¹ Representing only a portion of the larger list of nations that have adopted, adapted, reflected, and refracted aspects of RRI, the unique contexts collected together here include Australia (Ashworth et al. 2019), Brazil (Reyes-Galindo, Monteiro, and Macnaghten 2019), China (Gao, Liao, and Zhao 2019), Germany (Ladikas et al. 2019), Italy (Arnaldi and Neresini 2019), the Netherlands (van der Molen et al. 2019), and Norway (Egeland, Forsberg, Maximova-Mentzoni 2019). Individually, the perspectives discuss tensions (e.g. van der Molen et al. 2019), barriers (e.g. Reyes-Galindo, Monteiro, and Macnaghten 2019), opportunities (e.g. Gao, Liao, and Zhao 2019), and applications (e.g. Egeland, Forsberg, Maximova-Mentzoni 2019) of RRI, among other intriguing topics. In their introduction to this special section, the guest editors employ Thomas and Dagnino’s (2005) notion of transduction to offer an incisive set of comparisons. As the guest editors note, transduction was developed from an analysis of numerous ‘failed technology-transfer driven development schemes.’ Through their contemplation of the various configurations of responsibility and innovation assembled together here, Doezema et al. explicate cases of ‘deceptively easy alignments,’ ‘aversion to outside control,’ the embrace of RRI as a ‘tool for learning’ as well as other insights that derive from their attention to ‘changes in the underlying meaning of objects and concepts’ associated with the global dissemination of RRI.

This issue concludes with a review of Laurent’s Democratic experiments: Problematizing nanotechnology and democracy in Europe and the United States (2017) by Pallett (2019). Pallett appreciates Laurent’s creation of ‘an evocative and densely ethnographic insight into emerging nanotechnologies and democratic procedures’ that analyzes ‘the problematization and coproduction of nanotechnology and democracy’ though attempts to represent, govern, and engage nanotechology and its publics. As Pallett notes, readers of JRI will be particularly interested in Chapter 5, which finds that ‘in both the European and US contexts RRI processes have been somewhat reduced down to a more narrow concern with “ethics” which may obscure broader questions about responsibility and power.’

Notes

1 See for instance the Pathways Declaration at http://pathways2019.eu/declaration/.