Necessary conditions for responsible innovation

As we reflect on what actions, changes, and realizations are possible due to the disruptive natural experiment of the current pandemic, there are reasons for both optimism and pessimism as industrial societies begin to rebuild and recover in the post-pandemic years ahead. Read through the lens of the COVID-19 crisis, this issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation is something of a meditation on social, methodological, and theoretical conditions with which any approach in the future to responsible innovation policy and practice will need to grapple. Together, the five research articles contained in the issue examine, among other persistent problems, the construction of participatory voices and the limits and capacities of those voices, the reception of the scientific community to calls for societal relevance and the strategies available to them for responding to those calls, and the soundness of the analogies that are used to frame influential views of innovation.

Carrier and Gartzlaff (2019) detect a discernable level of receptivity in the attitudes of European scientists and administrators towards fundamental ideas associated with responsible innovation. One can hardly overvalue the importance of the scientific community’s willingness—let alone their ability, but see Schikowitz (2019) below—to integrate public values, participatory inputs, and socio-technical collaborations within their cultural and institutional practices. The authors find a generally ‘welcoming attitude’ towards the twin ideas of science for society and science with society. Not only do they find a willingness on the part of ‘many scientists … to let the public contribute ideas and stimuli to their own research,’ Carrier and Gartzlaff also find that scientists appreciate ‘an interaction with society’ that ‘goes beyond the mere willingness to let the public discuss science-generated scenarios.’ At the same time, the authors also identify skepticism and concern, such as around perennial notions of public understanding of science and scientific autonomy. Still, they reason, such concerns ‘should be heeded in any effort to implement’ responsible innovation so that such efforts do not ‘backfire.’ Consistent with what others have concluded in business (Brand and Blok 2019), medical research (Mertens 2018), and national settings (Doezema et al. 2019), Carrier and Gartzlaff point to the need for ‘context-sensitive implementation’ of responsible innovation and for considering how it ‘might demand different procedures in different settings.’ They conclude that ‘there is plenty of room’ for implementing responsible innovation but advise that the scientific community’s ‘goodwill’ should not be wasted.

The next three research articles lead us through practical participatory and integrative activities widely thought necessary for implementing responsible innovation as well as for probing actors’ capacities to produce societally relevant and desirable outcomes.

Nielsen and Boenink (2019) offer a sobering meditation on the challenges of constructing ‘participatory voices’ and the futures they entail, especially regarding those whose relationship to time has become fraught. While noting that participation is a biomedical policy imperative, the authors nevertheless find it to be ‘practically as well as theoretically troublesome.’ The authors delve into some of the ‘core challenges’ of participation by way of an Alzheimer’s biomarker research project. Initially, they seek to help early stage Alzheimer’s patients ‘influence the research project in order to co-shape the potential clinical application(s)’ of the envisioned research outputs, for instance through a reflective card game. The ‘friendly skepticism’ they encounter from both researchers and patients, however, leads them to reflect transparently on their methodological footing (as do Lee et al. 2019 in a comparable experience) and on the conditions for meaningful public participation in research. In the process, they encounter and explore the deliberative capacities of patients, their deference to scientific authority, and differing views of what it means to participate in research. It is the challenging relationship with time and temporality that these patients who have recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease have, however, which is the most poignant condition. While this situation may seem unique to the special case they examine, Nielsen and Boenink argue that the interplay of technological uncertainties and subject dispositions applies more broadly to the rationales and assumptions of constructing participatory voices more generally, and should be more closely attended to.

Ketzer et al. (2019) also see public participation as playing both representative and ameliorative roles. Noting the importance to policy makers of public participation in renewable energy, the authors employ an interactive and deliberative approach to ascertain public views and values with respect to agrophotovoltaics (APV), an emerging technology that promises to address a trilemma of competing food, energy, and ecological issues and which they view as critical for sustainable transitions. Observing that ‘the implementation of renewable energy plants … has met with some opposition from the public and has considerably delayed the energy transition in Germany,’ the authors seek to understand public attitudes towards APV and at the same time to test the relevance of public participation for policy and industrial actors in this contested context. They find that the systems perspective that participants hold goes well beyond the NIMBY (not in my backyard) rationale typically attributed to reticent publics. Ketzer et al. also find value for early stage participation since the outputs of participatory exercises can serve to support responsible innovation when ‘there is still room for technology developers and decision-makers in politics, administration, and business to benefit from early participation and to improve their work to achieve a higher public acceptability.’

Transdisciplinary practices are thought to play a crucial role in transforming knowledge production insofar as ‘the close collaboration of scientists and societal actors’ can increase responsiveness to public concerns and societal grand challenges. Accordingly, Schikowitz (2019) sets out to better understand ‘why despite political commitment, research funding and personal motivation of the involved researchers,’ attempts at opening up knowledge production and generating societally relevant knowledge ‘often yield rather conventional scientific outcomes.’ She identifies and explores ‘how tensions between different demands are handled in practice and in particular how researchers try to align “societal relevance” and “scientific relevance” within research projects.’ Her findings confirm the conventionality of transdisciplinary outputs in her case, yet she also delves into the coping practices the scientists she observes have for dealing with these tensions and for balancing societally relevant knowledge with other forms of relevance. Her study suggests that transdisciplinary efforts fail to produce disruptive knowledge in part because of the limited options available to researchers for coping with the various demands and tensions placed on them. As she states, ‘due to a lack of available collective coping strategies for dealing with inherent tensions between different kinds of relevance, researchers fall back to familiar and already accepted practices that are mostly based on quantification.’ Arguing that it is ‘irresponsible towards individual researchers to leave them alone with figuring out how to cope with inherent tensions’ Schikowitz recommends opening up institutional options at both funding and professional advancement levels to support alternative possibilities for generating societally relevant knowledge.

Another condition for responsible innovation is the basic recognition among policy actors that science and innovation are not free of social, ethical, economic, or public values. While philosophers have worked to unmask the value-free ideal of science (e.g. Douglas 2009), so Papaioannou (2019) seeks to draw attention to the shortcomings of a similar ideal in economic theory. The author notes that many who ‘approach the emergence of new technological products and processes in evolutionary and institutional terms’ tend to position innovation ‘as if it was a value-neutral process of supply and demand, taking place in a free market and having nothing to do with politics.’ He argues that this inclination towards value neutrality ‘cloaks a de facto strong state intervention’ and ‘is defended by some neo-Schumpeterian thinkers who take a socio-biological path to explaining innovation and technical change’ while others appear to acknowledge the ‘value laden and dynamic process' of such change. Arguing that the latter are ‘more consistent with Schumpeter’s theory of economic development,’ Papaioannou elucidates an ‘intellectual divide within the neo-Schumpeterian approach to innovation as regards value-neutrality’ that turns on socio-biological versus historical methods of explaining innovation. Historical approaches recognize the role of values, interests, and power, which ‘implies that human (individual and collective) action is guided not only by economic values and material interests but also by moral and political values.’ In an allusion to the classical roots of responsible innovation, the author suggests that what Schumpeter and Marx appreciated as the role of ‘reason in human action’ is akin to the recognition by contemporary theorists and those whom they influence of the centrality of ‘the cognitive aspects of social agents’ decision making and the dynamic of their systemic interactions’ in innovation. Meanwhile, it is clear that enhancing reflexivity and anticipation are among the chief cognitive interests of responsible innovation, as proponents of Constructive Technology Assessment (Schot and Rip 1997) and more generally Technology Assessment (Grunwald 2018) have long recognized.

Just as Papaioannou reminds us of the political dimensions that infuse explanations and understandings of innovation on a national level, so Bhadra Haines in her review of Foster’s Reinventing Hoodia (2017) concludes this issue of JRI with a discussion of the global politics of knowledge from a feminist decolonial perspective. Her review points to the need to further problematize ‘what is meant by “inclusion” in discussions on patenting and ownership for responsible innovation’ in this case, around an indigenous plant native to South Africa, so as to take into account ‘profound power asymmetries.’

Of the various conditions touched upon in this issue of JRI–including the willingness and ability of scientists and innovators to respond to public needs and values, robust practices for eliciting and representing participatory voices, and sound theoretical footing for state and non-state actor interactions—while none can be considered sufficient, it is hard to imagine responsible innovation taking root as a future norm without any of them.