In this chapter, we explore potential synergies between Technology Assessment (TA) and Responsible Research & Innovation (RRI). We first investigate the intersection of TA and RRI by discussing their similarities and differences and then discuss how TA and RRI differ in their historical roots, objects of reflection, and timing. Building on this theoretical exploration, we share our firsthand experiences in three large European projects that revolved around studying and implementing RRI within industrial settings. By examining and leveraging potential synergies between TA and RRI, our objective is to enhance the overall governance of emerging technologies. Reflecting on our findings with the aforementioned literature streams, we highlight overarching practical challenges that one might encounter when using TA or RRI in industrial contexts. In sum, this chapter not only advances theoretical understanding but also offers practical insights with implications for future research and applications in the ever-evolving landscape of technology and innovation.@en

This chapter discusses principles, frameworks, and steps for designing a roadmap to implement Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in industrial practices. It is based on invaluable experience gathered from the EU-funded PRISMA project, in which a trans-disciplinary group of experts from research, industries, and policy developed guidelines to include relevant societal values in the development strategy of innovative products. These guidelines are built on existing corporate social responsibility (CSR) and quality, risk and innovation management standards and policies. Fundamentally, they provide a management standard (Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle) that could help companies to introduce structural changes in their usual business practices toward more anticipatory, inclusive, and RRI practices (responsibility-by-design). The guidelines can be used by researchers, businesses, and innovators to develop long-term strategies (roadmaps) for Responsible Innovation, which, in turn, help organizations identify and achieve technologies geared toward ethically and socially desirable outcomes.

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Mission-oriented innovation policy is currently gaining renewed interest as an approach for addressing societal challenges. One of the promises is that missions can mobilise and align diverse stakeholders around a shared goal. Recent literature underlines the importance of public participation (e.g. municipalities and civil society organisations) in the socioeconomic transformations required for attaining missions. We ask how public participation differs among (non-)mission-oriented innovation projects. Drawing on a database containing Dutch government-funded innovation projects, we investigate whether mission-oriented projects are associated with earlier, more open, and more influential forms of public participation than conventional projects. Although the results suggest that mission-oriented projects indeed correspond with earlier participation of more public actors, we find little evidence that they also coincide with increased diversity and financial influence of public participants. We conclude by discussing how policymakers and intermediaries may engage in strategies to make missions more inclusive.@en

In this paper, we use an economic approach to demonstrate why ‘rational’ businesses are not likely to implement responsible innovation (RI) unless it is economically profitable. The lack of sufficient insights into economic impacts of RI is often induced by information asymmetry. Such asymmetry would hinder consumers who would otherwise be willing to pay higher prices for products or services that are assumed to be associated with RI from actually paying a higher price. We consider the introduction of a certification scheme of RI that would act as a signaling proxy to reduce information asymmetry thereby help increase economic benefits of RI implementation that can further lead to firm profitability. Furthermore, we argue that certification can help facilitate the more effective spread of RI in the business sector by broadening the focus to include not only the ethical engagement of researchers/innovators but also the profit motives of the company.@en

In this paper, we introduce the Societal Readiness (SR) Thinking Tool to aid researchers and innovators in developing research projects with greater responsiveness to societal values, needs, and expectations. The need for societally-focused approaches to research and innovation—complementary to Technology Readiness (TR) frameworks—is presented. Insights from responsible research and innovation (RRI) concepts and practice, organized across critical stages of project-life cycles are discussed with reference to the development of the SR Thinking Tool. The tool is designed to complement not only shortfalls in TR approaches, but also improve upon other efforts to integrate RRI, sustainability, and design thinking in research and innovation cycles. Operationalization and early-stage user tests of the Tool are reported, along with discussion of potential future iterations and applications.@en

Standardisation is increasingly seen as a means to insert ethics in innovation processes. We examine the institutionalisation of responsible innovation in de jure standardisation as this is an important but unexplored research area. In de jure standardisation, stakeholders collaborate in committees to develop standards. We adopt the anticipation, inclusion, reflexivity, and responsiveness responsible innovation framework as our theoretical lens. Our study suggests that responsible standardisation processes should embody forms of these four dimensions. We investigate the institutionalisation of these dimensions and identify 96 factors that can motivate, hinder, or facilitate responsible standardisation. Factors were found through in-depth interviews with managers of a standard developing organisation. These are subsequently validated/rejected using surveys completed by committee representatives. The results suggest that the social desirability of standards is not self-evident. This study could pave the way for future research on responsible standardisation processes, complementing research on legitimacy, responsible innovation, and standardisation.@en

While originally intended to transform research and innovation practice, the concept of responsible research and innovation (RRI) has largely remained a theoretical, policy-oriented construct, thereby engendering a perception that RRI indicators are very different from organizational or business indicators. As there is currently limited experience with RRI in businesses, in an attempt to gain more insights into RRI in practice, this paper focuses on an exploratory assessment of key performance indicators (KPIs) in a nanomedicine project. Based on correspondence analysis, we visually demonstrate associations among KPIs of RRI dimensions and of organizational ongoing R&D dimensions implying that these two indicators are not entirely different from each other and may even be potentially aligned. This finding may stimulate the motives of the RRI uptake in practice.@en

Responsible Research and Innovation and Responsible Innovation, as academic endeavours, have grown substantially since their birth in the previous decades. They have been used as synonyms on a structural basis, and both concepts have been studied from various disciplinary backgrounds. This paper identifies Responsible Research and Innovation's and Responsible Innovation's shared research topics, knowledge base, and academic organisation as a common ground for scholars to further their individual or joint research. It does so by conducting a keyword analysis and a collaboration analysis, combined with a reference analysis of their academic literature. This paper discusses the most influential references in chronological order and sheds light on the accumulation of knowledge. The results suggest that Responsible Research and Innovation and Responsible Innovation have matured into an increasingly cumulative and interconnected research trajectory following the footsteps of similar, more mature research areas.

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There is now almost a decade of experience with RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation), including a growing emphasis on RRI in industry. Based on our experiences in the EU-funded project PRISMA, we find that the companies we engaged could be motivated to do RRI, but often only after we first shifted initial assumptions and strategies. Accordingly, we formulate six lessons we learned in the expectation that they will be relevant both for RRI in industry as well as for the future of RRI more broadly. These lessons are: (1) Strategize for stakeholder engagement; (2) Broaden current assessments; (3) Place values center stage; (4) Experiment for responsiveness; (5) Monitor RRI progress; and (6) Aim for shared value.

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This work aims to re-investigate different aspects of a variety of filters and filtration processes within diverse realms of knowledge from an interdisciplinary point of view, and develops a comprehensive Active Model of Filter that accommodates the phenomena in its entire diversity and complexity. The Active Filter Model proposes to take Filter-from various fields and scales operating at material and symbolic level-not as mere objects, but as difference-producing phenomena that need to be addressed as complex active systems within event-based boundaries. The model underlines a systemic, operative, performative, and negentropic nature to the phenomena that invites one to; recognize various elements and intra-actions within a filter system; follow chains of operations and processes that render the activity; take the performative and ecology building aspect of the filter activity into consideration; and acknowledge the negentropic, order-producing nature of filtering phenomena. The Active Filter Model is meant to serve as a foundation for further analysis and synthesis in various fields dealing with Filter, and the research approach is put forward as a paradigm for how seemingly disciplinary concepts such as Filter can be rethought through interdisciplinary methods, and mutually complement research questions within active matter, biology, information philosophy, data science and sustainability discourses.

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This chapter provides a political and philosophical analysis of the values at stake in ensuring cybersecurity for critical infrastructures. It presents a review of the boundaries of cybersecurity in national security, with a focus on the ethics of surveillance for protecting critical infrastructures and the use of AI. A bibliographic analysis of the literature is applied until 2016 to identify and discuss the cybersecurity value conflicts and ethical issues in national security. This is integrated with an analysis of the most recent literature on cyber-threats to national infrastructure and the role of AI. This chapter demonstrates that the increased connectedness of digital and non-digital infrastructure enhances the trade-offs between values identified in the literature of the past years, and supports this thesis with the analysis of four case studies.

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When it comes to innovation, companies need to think of the impact of their innovation on direct users, indirect stakeholders and even society at large. How can companies innovate responsibly? More specifically, how can companies align societal and ethical values with commercial interests as part of their innovation strategy? What does this mean for their corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy? The above questions are the focus of this ‘best practice paper’. We will describe a roadmap (strategic process) that companies can follow to integrate ‘Responsible (Research and) Innovation (RRI)’ into their CSR policies and business strategy. We will also highlight key performance indicators (KPIs) for monitoring these objectives. The expected outcome of adopting RRI is that companies may gain numerous benefits, among others: • Strengthening links with consumers and end-users; • Enhancing the company’s reputation (trust); • Decreasing business risks and unintended consequences; • Strengthening public trust in the safety of products; • Adopting and environmentally profile; • Medium-term competiveness. This paper is fully based on the results of EU- Horizon 2020 project titled ‘PRISMA’ (promoting responsible innovation in industry) (see: https://www.rri-prisma.eu/). The overall goal of the PRISMA project was the development of an RRI roadmap to support industrial companies in integrating RRI into their research and innovation (R&I) strategies and activities by integrating technical, ethical, social, environmental and economic issues into R&I practices, by improving the ethical and social impacts of their outcomes.  @en

Cybersecurity is of capital importance in a world where economic and social processes increasingly rely on digital technology. Although the primary ethical motivation of cybersecurity is prevention of informational or physical harm, its enforcement can also entail conflicts with other moral values. This contribution provides an outline of value conflicts in cybersecurity based on a quantitative literature analysis and qualitative case studies. The aim is to demonstrate that the security-privacydichotomy—that still seems to dominate the ethics discourse based on our bibliometric analysis—is insufficient when discussing the ethical challenges of cybersecurity. Furthermore, we want to sketch how the notion of contextual integrity could help to better understand and mitigate such value conflicts.@en

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) is an approach to research and innovation governance aiming to ensure that research purpose, process and outcomes are acceptable, sustainable and even desirable. In order to achieve this ambitious aim, RRI must be relevant to research and innovation in industry. In this paper, we discuss a way of understanding and representing RRI that resonates with private companies and lends itself to practical implementation and action. We propose the development of an RRI maturity model in the tradition of other well-established maturity models, linked with a corporate research and development (R&D) process. The foundations of this model lie in the discourse surrounding RRI and selected maturity models from other domains as well as the results of extensive empirical investigation. The model was tested in three industry environments and insights from these case studies show the model to be viable and useful in corporate innovation processes. With this approach, we aim to inspire further research and evaluation of the proposed maturity model as a tool for facilitating the integration of RRI in corporate management.

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Responsible research and innovation (RRI) has become an important topic in the academic community and in policy circles, but it has not yet been systematically included in the innovation process of companies. We discuss how companies can integrate RRI into their corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies and business strategy. To this end, we developed a conceptual model that links a company's RRI strategy to its context, and that helps to translate the RRI strategy into activities that result in RRI outcomes. We also propose a process for developing company-specific RRI key performance indicators (KPIs) that can support companies to measure RRI outcomes.

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