Toward institutionalization of responsible innovation in the contemporary research university: insights from case studies of Arizona State University

ABSTRACT

A comprehensive organizational reconceptualization undertaken by Arizona State University (ASU) during the past two decades has been motivated in part by an explicit intent to institutionalize reflexive understandings of societal responsibility within a major public research university. In the process of operationalizing new models for the American research university, ASU embarked on an academic reorganization that institutionalized the conditions for responsible innovation. Indeed, this institutionalization proceeded contemporaneously with—and in some cases preceded—the systematic articulation of responsible innovation discourses by an international community of scholars. As a transformed and transformational institution, the case of ASU points to the need for research universities to rethink societal responsibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Research universities
• knowledge production
• organizational institutionalization
• responsible innovation
• societal responsibility
• reflexivity

Although the teaching of responsible innovation is an important and growing topic of scholarly and policy interest (Hesjedal et al. 2020; Tokalić et al. 2021), considerably less attention has been devoted to the institutionalization of responsible innovation within the research university itself. The long running commitment to societal responsibility in American academic culture (Bok 1982; Gavazzi and Gee 2018; Kerr [1963] 2001; Rhodes 2001) provides a starting point for reflection. Although societal responsibility and responsible innovation are interrelated and interdependent concepts, a commitment to the former is not necessarily sufficient for the latter to flourish. Rather, we propose that organizations committed to discovery and innovation have a societal responsibility to recognize that outcomes of knowledge production and technological innovation are not inherently aligned with important societal goals (Albertson et al. 2021; Brunner and Ascher 1992; Papaioannou 2020; Sarewitz 1996, 10–11). ‘At the level of institutional practice,’ as Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten (2013, 1571) point out, reflexivity means ‘holding a mirror up to one’s own activities, commitments, and assumptions, being aware of the limits of knowledge, and being mindful that a particular framing of an issue may not be universally held.’

The comprehensive organizational reconceptualization undertaken by Arizona State University (ASU) during the past two decades has been motivated in part by the intent to institutionalize such a reflexive understanding of societal responsibility within a major public research university (Crow and Dabars 2015; 2020). In the process of restructuring its academic organization to instantiate new models for the American research university, ASU institutionalized what was simultaneously articulated as responsible innovation, albeit on a de facto basis (Randles 2017). We show how the implicit objectives found within contemporary scholarly discourses on responsible innovation were integral to the explicit and reflexive commitment of the ASU academic community to institutionalize societal responsibility. Moreover, this institutionalization proceeded contemporaneously with—and in some cases preceded—the systematic articulation of the discourses of responsible innovation by scholars whose normative concerns contributed to the consolidation of a distinct international epistemic community. Although proposed frameworks of responsible innovation would emerge subsequently and independently among scholars in the US, UK, and Europe, ASU administrators, scientists, technologists, and scholars can be seen to have systematically institutionalized its contours into the organizational structures and governance of the university in an effort to bridge fundamental tensions and contradictory organizational logics that continue to limit the contemporary research university. Accordingly, the process undertaken by ASU has been characterized as a reflexive ‘institutional experiment conducted at scale in real time … across interrelated and mutually interdependent dimensions’ intended to institutionalize and operationalize a new model for the American research university (Crow and Dabars 2020, 101).

A reflexive commitment to societal responsibility is implicit in the white paper that envisioned ASU as the foundational prototype of the New American University (Crow et al. 2004). Coupled with the operationalization of its reorganizational initiatives, ASU promoted an organizational context consistent with the discourses of responsible innovation and instituted its tenets within the university through the reconceptualization of the societal responsibility of the university. Conventional understandings of academic culture notwithstanding (e.g. Polanyi 1962), by recognizing that a commitment to knowledge production is not identical with a commitment to the public interest, ASU reoriented the academic organization and institutional logics of the university itself. Such organizational change and institutional innovation are both possible and necessary if universities intend to participate differentially in the responsible governance of research and innovation in society.

Operationalization of the New American University model envisioned by ASU president Michael M. Crow beginning in 2002 demonstrates that major public research universities in the United States can differentially integrate broad accessibility with academic excellence to achieve maximum societal impact (Crow and Dabars 2015). The subsequently conceived Fifth Wave model extends the objectives of the New American University model by envisioning the emergence of a subset, or league, of similarly committed public research universities (Crow and Dabars 2020). Inasmuch as both models couple societal responsibility with discovery and innovation undertaken to advance the public interest, ASU is a progenitor of the differential institutionalization of responsible innovation in the contemporary university.

New models for the American research university

As delineated in two comprehensive case studies of the reconceptualization of Arizona State University (Crow and Dabars 2015, 240–303; 2020, 98–203), the scope and scale of the process was initially motivated by the intent to improve the accessibility, academic performance, and research output of one of the nation’s largest and youngest public research universities. A resolve to counter the competitive isomorphism that has metastasized within the ecosystem of American higher education (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Hannan and Freeman 1977) coupled with the determination to mitigate demographic pressures associated with the location of ASU in the American Southwest (Grawe 2018) were cited as objectives. As the only comprehensive research university in a diverse megapolitan agglomeration in a state then projected to double in population by midcentury, ASU realized the imperative to respond to Arizona’s lagging educational attainment, lackluster economic output, and demographic diversification (Crow et al. 2004). The New American University model is thus ‘predicated on accessibility to an academic platform underpinned by discovery and knowledge production, inclusiveness to a broad demographic representative of the socioeconomic diversity of the region and nation, and, through its breadth of functionality, maximization of societal impact’ (Crow and Dabars 2015, 60). In this manner, societal responsibility was institutionalized as an organizational principle capable of encompassing multiple, even conflicting institutional logics, and advancing both the normative aspirations of access, inclusion, and diversity of students, as well as instrumental revenue objectives stemming from the university’s participation in local and national political economies.

The distinctive commitment of the university to societal responsibility is expressed in the charter, which recapitulates the precepts of the foundational New American University white paper (Crow et al. 2004):

Arizona State University is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed; advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural, and overall health of the communities it serves (Arizona State University 2014).

Among the precepts specified in the white paper is that ASU must serve as a ‘preeminent catalyst to transform society, improve the human condition, foster sustained social advancement and economic growth, and promote responsible planetary stewardship’ (Crow et al. 2004). The intent to ‘offer admission to all academically qualified Arizona residents regardless of financial means’ and to ‘maintain a student body representative of the spectrum of socioeconomic diversity of American society’ is similarly consistent with ASU’s interpretation of societal responsibility. Associated metrics of success subsequently reported in both case studies (Crow and Dabars 2015, 255–267; 2020, 98–100, 110–120; 120–126) include such interrelated indicators as unprecedented increases in enrollment, degree production, and growth of diversity among students, especially from socioeconomically disadvantaged and historically underrepresented backgrounds and first-generation college applicants, and growth by more than a factor of five in research-related expenditures.

The Fifth Wave model complements, augments, and extends the accomplishments of the currently dominant model—instantiated by the set of roughly two hundred American research universities—by further optimizing scientific discovery and technological innovation, which has long been embraced as a catalyst for industrial application and economic growth (Jones 2002; Mokyr 2002; Mowery and Rosenberg 1998; Owen-Smith 2018). In the Fifth Wave, an envisioned league or alliance of universities simultaneously promotes world-class knowledge production but also seeks to effect a shift toward desired societal outcomes.¹ Their integrated platforms of research, development, and education contribute not only ideas, products, and processes but, more importantly, educated citizens and knowledgeable workers (Becker 1993). Insofar as knowledge is a public good (Stiglitz 1999), higher education confers both private and social benefits that enhance economic growth and societal wellbeing (Hout 2012; McMahon 2009). Leading colleges and universities, however, now routinely exclude the majority of academically qualified applicants and socioeconomic status remains the best predictor of whether students will graduate with a bachelor’s degree (Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson 2009; Chetty et al. 2017). The public value of research universities cannot be captured by simplistic algorithms that purport to classify and rank order heterogeneous organizations (Calhoun 2006). Accordingly, ASU has embraced the commitment (and in many cases the research programs) of social scientists who have sought to provide guidance to improve the public value of research and innovation (Bozeman 2020; Guston 2004; Jørgensen and Bozeman 2007; Newfield 2016; Prewitt 2019; Sarewitz 1996).

The commitment of any university to societal responsibility begins with managing the tension between academic excellence and broad accessibility (Calhoun 2006). ASU admits all academically qualified Arizona resident applicants regardless of socioeconomic status and seeks to provide students with unrestricted access to research-based educational opportunities. The overarching intent is to ‘demonstrate that research excellence and broad accessibility need not be mutually exclusive.’ The academic platform couples within a single institution the world-class research excellence of the University of California system with the accessibility offered by the Cal State system (Crow and Dabars 2020, 73, 127–128). Members of the envisioned league of Fifth Wave universities differentially pursue ‘epistemic, pedagogical, and institutional innovation, including the creative use of learning technologies’ and cooperate across academic disciplines and economic sectors. The pedagogical approach integrates research-based learning within the context of a comprehensive liberal arts foundation because ‘mere access to standardized forms of instruction decoupled from discovery and knowledge production will not deliver desired societal outcomes’ (Crow and Dabars 2020, vii, 3, 39). Since aggregate enrollment capacity is scalable, this subset of universities will bolster research and educational outcomes (Taylor et al. 2021) as well as help meet the workforce demands of the emergent economy. In its insistence on transdisciplinary and trans-sectoral application of socially robust knowledge production and innovation, this model reorients contemporary academic culture toward socially relevant research as advocated by discourses on responsible innovation (Guston et al. 2014; Ribeiro et al. 2018; Stahl et al. 2021; Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013) and proponents of Mode 2 knowledge production (Gibbons et al. 1994; Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2003).

Organizational constructs to institutionalize societal responsibility

Since the remit for societal responsibility that ASU assumed reflexively is conceptually broad, its practical and theoretical approaches are varied and experimental. Thus, several of its signature centers build squarely on the foundations of centers for responsible innovation, which act as boundary organizations (Guston 2001, 2004, 2007) that advance the ‘mission of institutionalizing responsible innovation at research universities.’ In this context, Guston elaborates: ‘Failure to institutionalize such an ensemble of activities is not just a failure to pursue responsibility more actively, but it is failure to pursue efficiently the mission of the university’ (2007, 304). Parker and Crona extend the criteria of boundary organizations by developing the concept of ‘university-based boundary organizations,’ according to which they characterize ASU as a new kind of American university that ‘aspires to be a boundary organization writ large’ (2012, 265–267, 285n4).

Consistent with frameworks for real-time technology assessment (Guston and Sarewitz 2002) and anticipatory governance (Barben et al. 2008), ASU hosted the Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS-ASU) from 2005 to 2016. On the one hand, CNS-ASU helped give rise to an ‘extensive network’ of researchers studying the societal dimensions of nanotechnology (Youtie et al. 2019). On the other hand, and of equal importance, it also demonstrated that engaged societal research can contribute ‘not only to traditional knowledge production, but also to the capacity of individual researchers and research communities for greater reflexivity and responsiveness, ultimately for the sake of more socially robust national research systems’ (Radatz et al. 2019, 863). In this way, CNS-ASU not only generated knowledge intended to serve the public interest, it helped to embed that knowledge within the very communities it sought to serve. CNS-ASU is representative of several transdisciplinary institutional constructs that ASU designed to advance conditions that foster responsible innovation. For example, the efforts of CNS-ASU are epitomized by the mission of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, which advocates pursuing a ‘vision of responsible innovation that anticipates challenges and opportunities, integrates diverse knowledge and perspectives, and engages broad audiences’ (2021).

Retrospective evaluation of the four dimensions of responsible innovation delineated by Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten (2013, 1573–1574)—anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion, and responsiveness—provides further insight into the seminal idea that ASU has institutionalized responsible innovation on a de facto basis (Randles et al. 2016). For example, when it was established in 2004, the ASU Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC), which Parker and Crona describe as a university-based boundary organization (2012, 267–281), anticipated strategies to transition to urban water sustainability in the arid Colorado River Basin. Rather than producing idealized or generalized future scenarios, DCDC has become a centerpiece of engagement between the academy and local communities by practicing socially robust and plausible anticipation. The ongoing Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR) program at ASU demonstrates the benefits of putting reflexivity into practice in research laboratories at ASU and beyond (e.g. Smolka, Fisher, and Hausstein 2021). As demonstrated not only by its charter but also its investments in accessibility and resultant changes in enrollment, ASU is uniquely and explicitly committed to inclusion of underserved populations. Finally, inasmuch as ASU explicitly ‘assumes fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural, and overall health of the communities it serves’ (Arizona State University 2014), the university embodies responsiveness. The interdependent design aspirations introduced in the foundational white paper are responsive to the objective of enhancing ‘local impact and social embeddedness’ by, for example, co-developing ‘solutions to the critical social, technical, cultural, and environmental issues facing twenty-first-century Arizona’ (Crow et al. 2004).

An appreciation of the coexistence of multiple and often contradictory institutional logics variously conducive or inimical to the institutionalization of novel normative orientations (Greenwood et al. 2017) suggests the complexities associated with the reconceptualization of ASU. As delineated by Owen and colleagues (2021, 2), these include the ‘logic of the autonomous ivory tower,’ the utilitarian logic associated with the entrepreneurial university (Shields and Watermeyer 2018), and the managerial logic that comports with the bureaucratization of universities. Apart from societal responsibility, the institutional logics (Thornton and Ocasio 2008) that have guided the administration and academic culture at ASU include societal embeddedness, sustainable development, global engagement, and academic enterprise, which incentivizes risk-taking and entrepreneurial initiative within the academic community. Consistent with its charter, a reflexive understanding of societal responsibility underpins and crosscuts the institutional logics at ASU. Indeed, as Randles put it: ‘Institutional entrepreneurialism is shown at ASU to be encultured, critical, reflexive, and collective; and articulated at multiple levels within the organization’ (2017, 278). Moreover, the ‘normative business model’ instituted at ASU (Randles and Laasch 2016) is diametrically opposed to the normative orientation of the ‘republic of science’ famously articulated by Polanyi (1962), which explicitly separates knowledge production from the kind of societal interactions that organizational and research endeavors at ASU intentionally seek to cultivate.

Toward institutionalization of responsible innovation

During the past two decades, the New American University and Fifth Wave models, which are explicitly associated with societal responsibility, were developed and operationalized at ASU contemporaneously with—and in some ways preceding—articulation of the conceptual foundations of responsible innovation. The imperative that science and innovation be ‘directed at, and undertaken towards, socially desirable and socially acceptable ends, with connotations of trust and integrity’ (Owen et al. 2013, 27) has been recognized and implemented in the design aspirations and reorganizational efforts of ASU, which has served both as a progenitor of responsible innovation and an exemplar of what is possible in this context within the contemporary research university.

The proposition that research universities have the potential to institutionalize responsible innovation presumes that organizations committed to discovery and innovation articulate institutional profiles consistent with societal responsibility. This sort of self-determination follows from reflexively recognizing that outcomes of knowledge production and technological innovation are not inherently aligned with important societal goals (Sarewitz 1996). The intent to advance useful knowledge demands that academic culture embrace the imperative of responsibility (Jonas 1984). To ‘take care of the future through collective stewardship of science and innovation in the present’ (Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013, 1570), academic culture writ large must find ways to institutionalize such understandings of societal responsibility. Despite transformational contributions to knowledge production (Cole 2009), technological innovation (Geiger 1986; Narayanamurti and Odumosu 2016; Owen-Smith 2018; Rosenberg 2003), societal wellbeing (McMahon 2009), and economic growth (Goldin and Katz 2008; Jones 2002), limitations in the current model of research universities—especially with regard to disciplinarity, scalability, and societal responsibility—reduce their ability to meet emerging societal challenges (Crow and Dabars 2020, 10, 326–329). Therefore, we call upon major public research universities to reflexively develop and pilot experimental models that foster responsible innovation within the contexts in which they operate. These efforts will support education, research, and public service at the scales needed to respond to the opportunities and challenges facing society today.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge Michael M. Crow, Erik Fisher, David Guston, and Daniel Sarewitz for providing inspiration for or input on this article and express their appreciation to the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their substantive and incisive critiques.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William B. Dabars

William B. Dabars is a research professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Senior Global Futures Scholar in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, and senior research fellow in the Office of the President, Arizona State University.

Kevin T. Dwyer

Kevin T. Dwyer is a doctoral candidate in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and research associate in the Office of the President, Arizona State University.

Notes

1 Organizational peers identified in this context include Purdue University, Pennsylvania State University, and the University System of Maryland. In 2014, a coalition of eleven major public research universities established the University Innovation Alliance and agreed to pursue initiatives consistent with the Fifth Wave. Alliance members promote educational attainment especially among historically underrepresented and socioeconomically disadvantaged students (Crow and Dabars 2020, 19, 185–189).