Responsible innovation in scientific practice: prospects, tensions and the long game

Welcome to the first entirely open access volume and issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation!

One of the hallmarks of responsible innovation is its attempt to generally encompass multiple sites, sectors, levels and dispositions in its theories, methods and practical undertakings. This synoptic approach invites both broadly inclusive frameworks as well as focused attention on specific contexts and capacities in light of guiding aspirations for the normative governance of science, technology and innovation. Scholars and practitioners alike must therefore navigate and negotiate an array of ongoing challenges and essential tensions that arise from the interplay of numerous frames of reference and sources of concern – and which often show up in the form of enduring modern dichotomies, e.g. between structure and agency, social and material, citizen and expert.

In what perhaps marks a symbolic re-visitation of one of the classic institutions motivating discourses around responsible innovation (cf. Doubleday 2007; Fisher 2007), the five articles in this issue of JRI all ground their inquiries within one or more worlds of scientific practice, albeit across differing research, communication and deliberative settings. Each of these various sites and settings provide opportunities to engage scientific ‘responsibility practices’ in light of broader governance contexts and concerns. As Gjefsen and Vie (2021) state in this issue, responsible innovation proceeds by insisting not only on public engagement but also ‘that dialogue and reflection should inform technical practice’ in order ‘to extend civic capacity and deliberation to the hegemonic spaces of technical experts.’ Thus in this issue we visit an assortment of scientific fields, governance themes and scholarly objects of attention ranging from imaginaries, identities and materialities to futures, ethics and games. The authors show in their articles how such resources as these variously authorize, anchor and afford researcher and technology developer collective responses to anticipatory, inclusive and normative promptings.

In a study primarily of British xenobiologists, Aparicio (2021) adeptly exposes how imagined publics, technological commitments and conceptions of responsibility co-produce one another and help shape laboratory research agendas. Aparicio shows how conceptions of responsibility hinge in this case on an imaginary of the public ‘as expectant of safety’ in which publics and technologies are kept separate from one another – both inside and outside of the laboratory – through a particular vision of ‘biocontainment.’ While laboratory research is shaped in part through ‘the association of responsibility with design principles,’ the author questions what he sees as the xenobiologists’ ‘overconfidence in controlling uncertainty and ambiguity.’ Given the extended network of actors that may use or modify the technology, placing too much weight on design principles can risk ‘pre-empting political discussion and participation,’ particularly if it proceeds through a vision of compliance rather than co-responsibility. Aparicio thus argues that the xenobiologists’ ‘adherence to a vision of biocontainment, as a problem defined in advance’ limits responsiveness, flexibility, and ‘the pursuit of alternative pathways in xenobiology.’ Acknowledging the difficulty in doing so, Aparicio nevertheless senses opportunities ‘to break up dichotomies beyond risk and safety, the natural and the unnatural, the laboratory and the outside world’ in order to ‘introduce new narratives into the laboratory.’ Such narratives should ‘include social values and the world-building capacity of biotechnology.’

Given that responsible innovation ‘necessitates changes in how research and innovation are carried out’ such that ‘scientists must assume new roles and responsibilities, and embrace new ways “to do research”,’ Regan (2021) in the next article investigates the ‘readiness’ of Irish agricultural scientists to undertake responsible innovation in digital agriculture. The author thus seeks to discover how agricultural scientists are ‘already thinking about and responding to’ a wide variety of contextual considerations in their day-to-day roles. Findings include a number of practices that align closely with responsible innovation frameworks, including a willingness to engage in socially inclusive and anticipatory forms of thinking, concerns that the needs of all farmers be considered, and an interest in ‘responding to these challenges’ by trying to ‘change the direction of this innovation trajectory.’ Although Regan finds substantial evidence of inclusion in practice, the author also uncovers conflicts that point to scientific identity as a limiting factor for responsible innovation. At the heart of these tensions is scientists’ commitment to ‘ensuring “scientific excellence” above all else,’ which manifests in their valuing expert over lay knowledge. Regan therefore suggests that ‘reflexive thinking’ is a more difficult dimension of responsible innovation to practice in this setting than anticipation or inclusion, and yet, that reflexivity is ‘the core lever’ needed ‘to ensure that all other dimensions are undertaken with a genuine willingness to … reflect upon and respond to the concerns, priorities and needs of other actors.’

The third article brings an often overlooked dimension of responsible innovation into clearer view. Emphasizing ‘the inseparability of the technical and the social’ that informs responsible innovation frameworks, Gjefsen and Vie (2021) examine the understudied role of materiality in shaping researchers’ responsibility practices, in this case in a Norwegian university’s flagship cyborg initiative. Drawing attention to the importance not only of scientists’ attitudes and motivations in affecting ‘whether and how communication and public engagement contributes to responsible research and innovation,’ but also the materiality of the artifacts with which they work, the authors set out to examine ‘how objects of research influence the contexts and outcomes of communication.’ Drawing on Davis’ (2020) structural and relational model of affordances, they explore how the cybernetic organism being constructed ‘influences outcomes of research communication’ about the cyborg. Gjefsen and Vie find a ‘wide range of affordances’ that enable and constrain communication outcomes across diverse settings and that center around ‘communication management, attaining benefits, and building collaboration.’ They also find that ‘public visibility’ was ‘gained less by organizational mechanisms designed to encourage communication in a generic sense, and more by the specific features of the cyborg.’ These findings indicate the need for artifact-specific approaches to better understanding and attending to the institutionally-minded ‘ambitions for early and meaningful public engagement’ in responsible innovation.

Continuing the theme of materiality and responsibility, Roßmann (2020) explores the viability of a novel approach for analyzing both ‘material and socio-cultural constraints’ in the generation of imagined futures in technology assessment and development. Drawing on Walton’s (1990) theory of representational arts and games of make-believe, Roßmann seeks to provide a more significant account of the role ‘considered feasibility’ can play in explaining imagined futures (cf. Selin 2011). Analyzing the results of a scenario workshop on microalgae nutrition among stakeholders in Germany, he illustrates how material props, following Beckert (2016), ‘stimulate the imagination of fictional worlds’ on the part of participating stakeholders who ‘engaged in a game of make-believe that projected practical limitations instead of just selling a promising story.’ He thus shows how ‘the consideration of … representational objects can alter imagined futures,’ arguing that ‘visions evolve at the limits of feasibility.’ Roßmann observes that making-believe ‘is not a solitary practice’ of individual actors but rather ‘the joint application of rules.’ Furthermore – and here one recalls Regan’s emphasis on reflexivity – Roßmann observes that focusing on the ‘considered feasibility’ of imagined futures opens up new angles on understanding responsibility since, unlike other symmetrical accounts of nature and culture, making-believe incorporates yet also distinguishes between both ‘imagining subjects and … included objects.’

In the final Research Article, Urquhart and Craigon (2021) report on the development and testing of a risk-based approach to ethics by design in the form of a card deck and assessment board. Similar to other capacity-building approaches socio-technical integration (Fisher et al., 2015), the game is meant ‘to support reflection by technologists on normative aspects of technology development, particularly at the early stages of design’ rather than relying on ‘outside assessment from ethicists or social scientists.’ In the card game, participants construct a scenario and assess its risks using ethical principles. Participants are invited to discuss ‘how best to proceed with value judgements’ using selected ethical principles in a flexible manner, meaning that the ethical principles can be used to think through both ‘risk and safeguard.’ A series of workshops involving software developers in industry shows that the cards ‘raise awareness of ethics in design’ through ‘questioning the values and practices being embedded into [technological] systems.’ The cards allow for ‘clustering and recombination of principles’ in response to contextual complexity. They also serve as ‘appropriate anchors’ for consensus-based group deliberation that counterbalance ‘inappropriate’ anchors that participants were observed to introduce into their deliberations. Urquhart and Craigston find that the cards ‘help to level the playing field and enable collaborative deliberation on ethics in a way similar to that found by Felt et al. (2014) where cards replaced expert voices but contained expert knowledge,’ thus increasing the confidence of industrial software designers to engage productively in ethical reflection.

This issue of JRI closes with two book reviews. In the first, Pirtle (2021) begins by stating, ‘Those interested in the US federal agencies seriously assessing the societal outcomes of science and engineering must read ‘Social Science for What?’ Pirtle thoughtfully and with an eye to the future of responsible innovation (RI) reviews Solovey’s (2020) historical account of how despite waves of ongoing skepticism, ‘managers at the National Science Foundation (NSF) overcame scientific and political opposition to create the NSF’s social science research programs that exist today.’ Skepticism towards the qualitative social sciences in particular often revolved around debates that they were immature and ‘more ideological than scientific.’ In Pirtle’s seasoned view, ‘the challenges that NSF’s social science programs faced in becoming institutionally and politically established may well apply to future RI research and efforts to better consider “science and society” within government.’ The debates that Solovey chronicles ‘raise a deep question about which organizational banner should be used to get more responsible science and engineering research and practice.’ In particular, and given ‘tensions within social science, should RI efforts in government self-identify as being part of social science … ?’ Despite Solovey’s preference for a separate social scientific agency that would ‘better enable critical reflection’, Pirtle favors a more integrative approach that can attend to the complexity of ‘people, values and the emergent interactions between social and technical systems’ on the basis that ‘qualitative work is a necessary input to good, values-focused governance and management of science and engineering.’ Regardless, Pirtle notes that “Solovey’s history suggests that ‘science and society’ and RI research could also require decades” before it is institutionally established as well as “continued additional ‘Sisyphean’ efforts” to help guide science and engineering to more socially beneficial ends.

Hankins (2021) in his review of Responsibility beyond growth. A case for responsible stagnation (de Saille et al. 2020), takes up a particular critical response primarily to European policy efforts around responsible innovation that has been building for some time (de Saille and Medvecky 2016; cf. Guston 2015). He considers the book a starting point along a path towards ‘just and more efficient innovation’ that asks how responsible innovation would develop ‘if it could be uncoupled from its aim to drive economic growth?’ Hankins finds the individual chapters – which variously take up the ‘paradoxical question’ of whether innovation can be responsible if it does not promote such growth – come together as an ensemble of meditations on these and other central questions. For, in Hankin’s view, just as ‘the scientization of innovation leads to the exclusion of non-experts’ so also does ‘the coupling to economic growth [lead] to the exclusion of a broad range of voices and considerations.’ The book’s contributors chase down these provocative questions within contexts of markets, the global south, and growth-agnostic practices. Reflecting on their focus on formal European policy prescriptions rather than on de facto, poiesis-intensive, or other forms of responsible innovation, Hankins wonders aloud whether the European Union’s approach might itself be seen ‘as an attempted technical fix, based on standards that don’t suit its style … ’

In short, this issue of JRI, as most explicitly seen in its four bookends – Pirtle’s and Hankin’s reviews, Aparicio’s and Regan’s research articles – point to various deep-seated and longstanding challenges to responsible innovation without losing sight of the values and aspirations that continue to enliven it.