Governance lies at the heart of instigating, steering, and creating the conditions for mission-oriented transitions that potentially help resolve some of our grand societal challenges. In doing so, policymakers will need to navigate both epistemic and normative considerations to develop, implement, and evaluate missions responsibly. A number of scholars have therefore expressed the need for a better conceptualization of responsible mission governance as a procedural approach, particularly with the aim of coping with the complexity, uncertainty, and contestation that render these wicked problems intractable. In this paper we develop an integrative framework for responsible mission governance by taking wickedness dimensions as our entry point. Accordingly, we argue that responsible mission governance should integrate various complementary governance responsibilities (e.g., reflexivity) and modes (e.g., reflexive governance) that potentially improve the effectiveness and desirability of missions.

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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

European research funding organizations (RFOs) are increasingly experimenting with public engagement in their funding activities. This case study draws attention to the challenges they face in preparing, implementing, and evaluating ethical public engagement in the context of setting funding priorities, formulating calls for proposals, and evaluating project proposals. We discuss challenges related to seven themes: (1) recruiting participants; (2) commitments and expectations; (3) meaningful dialogue and equal engagement; (4) accommodating vulnerability; (5) funding call formulations; (6) lack of expertise in engagement ethics; and (7) uncertainty, resource constraints, and external factors. To address these challenges, we propose the following seven interventions: (1) developing comprehensive recruitment strategies with experienced recruiters and community organizations; (2) establishing clear communication of roles, expectations, and outcomes through codes of conduct; (3) training mediators to address power imbalances; (4) designing flexible engagement methods and providing tailored support; (5) implementing collaborative feedback loops for inclusive funding call formulation; (6) enhancing ethical standards through internal expertise and external advisory inputs; and (7) developing adaptive strategies for flexible and ethical public engagement. These recommendations emphasize the need for context-adaptive insights to support funding organizations to implement ethical public engagement activities, even when faced with organizational constraints and a lack of ethical expertise.

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Transformative mission-oriented innovation policy aims to redirect innovation, but evidence of this directional ability is limited. This paper examines whether transformer missions redirect values reflected by mission-oriented projects. We study the EU Mission ‘Restore our Ocean and Waters’ and use probabilistic topic modelling and thematic analyses to identify, conceptualize, and compare latent values described in 17 policy documents (i.e., strategic layer), 37 mission-oriented projects, and 809 mission-relevant projects (i.e., operational layer). We map how these values changed during the mission launch. The results of this study are ambivalent. On the one hand, the mission launch corresponds with an increase of funded projects of which mission-oriented projects commonly frame efforts towards mission objectives. On the other hand, there is a misalignment between policy and project-level values while the prevalence of project-level values remained largely unaffected by the mission. These mixed results provide a more nuanced understanding of transformer missions’ directional abilities.

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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

Innovators are increasingly called upon to help resolve societal challenges such as pandemics, climate change, and social injustice. The complexity, uncertainty, and contestation associated with such wicked problems require them to leverage approaches that help navigate normative and epistemic considerations for decision-making. A large number of scholars and practitioners believe that the procedural approach of Responsible Innovation could offer this. Responsible Innovation aims to align innovations with societal values and worldviews through forms of anticipation, inclusion, reflexivity, and responsiveness. Early anticipatory and reflexive deliberations subsequently provide an understanding of what decisions and outcomes are deemed ethically acceptable in light of uncertainty. This dissertation explores the usefulness of some approaches applied by Responsible Innovation in tackling wicked problems. It suggests that Responsible Innovation paradoxically fosters collaborations while also revealing contestation, and that innovators will need to leverage boundary objects and combine complementary approaches to deal with the (multi-scalar) conflict that is attributed to societal challenges.@en

Responsible Innovation has recently been taken up in public policies and discourses. However, it remains challenging to institutionalise its core dimensions – inclusion, anticipation, responsiveness, reflexivity, and transparency – in practice. De jure standardisation is increasingly seen as an instrument to embed the core principles of Responsible Innovation in innovation processes, because of its anticipatory and inclusive nature. Yet, Responsible Innovation within the standardisation literature is an under-researched field of study. This paper explores and evaluates the relative importance of Responsible Innovation’s core dimensions in the standards development process. We identify eighteen criteria that are deemed essential to the quality of standardisation processes. The Best-Worst Method was used to rank these criteria on their perceived importance. Diversity of participation was found to be the most important contributing factor to the quality of standardisation.@en

Societal challenges tend to be characterized by their multi-scalarity as problems emerge and co-evolve on multiple scales. Resolving these challenges requires innovators to navigate often conflicting considerations between multiple scales when dealing with complexity, uncertainty, and contestation. Innovators need to ground resolutions in local values and worldviews while simultaneously fitting these into global efforts to help drive systemic responses. Nevertheless, studies on Responsible Innovation commonly focus exclusively on a local or global scale. In this perspective paper, we explore rationales for these two prevalent but opposing approaches, and provide tentative insights into how multi-scalarity could be navigated by uniting scales through a hybrid approach. The paper proceeds by opening up research on multi-scalarity, and the geographical and relational aspects of Responsible Innovation in a broader sense.@en

In shaping collective responses to societal challenges, we currently lack an understanding of how to grasp and navigate conflicting ideas on societal problems and potential solutions. The problem-solution space is an increasingly popular framework for conceptualizing the extent to which problem-oriented and solution-oriented views are divergent. However, this reflexive framework needs an operationalization to become useful in practice. We contribute to this debate by demonstrating how Q-methodology can be used to systematically identify, describe, and compare collectively held visions in relation to problems and solutions. We use the case of Dutch circular construction, and identify three conflicting imaginaries that inform us about disagreement and common ground. We conclude by discussing how policymakers can use different approaches to navigate contestation, presumably mobilizing actors for a collective response.@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

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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