Devoted to the RRI Tools project, the Responsibility in Research and Innovations conference took place in the Czech Republic (in the Senate) on 20 October 2016. It was organised by the Plzeň-based Techmania Science Center in co-operation with Grafia s.r.o, a project partner. 

One of the themes of the conference of the RRI Tools project was care and respect for nature and mankind, but also for other space bodies as a basic viewpoint in scientific, research and innovative work. Speakers from among leading Czech and foreign scientists, research and innovation companies, agencies and others discussed the issue of responsible research and innovation on specific cases.

RRI Tools as a project is coming to an end, as all other good things do, but partnerships will endure beyond the project lifetime and the RRI Community in Bulgaria will continue to grow. And this is precisely what happened at the last training session organized by the Bulgarian-Romanian RRI hub on 19 December in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The name of the event was “RRI legacy in Bulgaria - pay it forward”. Leaving a legacy means you entrust a dear thing to the secure hands of its successor. That is why we chose to leave RRI as a legacy to the oldest higher education institution in Bulgaria - Sofia University, St Kliment Ohridski, educating the future scientists, engineers, policy makers - citizens.

Invited by the Faculty of mathematics and informatics to organize a training session on the RRI Toolkit, we have established a promising partnership in order to collaborate and cooperate in bringing science closer to the society in Bulgaria.

Together with professors, lecturers and assistants, we have dived deep into RRI waters to discover a wealth of RRI tools gathered on the platform rri-tools.eu.

The RRI Tools leaflet is available in Bulgarian on RRI Tools media room.

On Monday 21 November 2016 three European research projects that are contributing actively towards the development of a smart, inclusive and sustainable society were honoured by the European Foundations Award for Responsible Research & Innovation (EFARRI). The Swedish Mistra Urban Futures, Italian water management project IMRR and Spanish miCROWDscopy were selected by a scientific jury from more than 200 applications to receive a prize of €20,000 to continue their valuable work in diverse fields.

The EFARRI finalists and laureates at the RRI Tools final conference (21 November 2016)

While responsible science is an old notion that has been raised and achieved to a different extent during the past, both locally and globally, the RRI concept as proposed by the European Commission seemed to be a novelty among various stakeholder groups in the Balkans.

The RRI has been extensively travelling this region for the past three years, during the course of the RRI Tools project. Coordinating the activities in as much as five countries, Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia, we had the opportunity during this period to meet representatives from many institutions, governing bodies and CSOs.

A series of workshops was held in the Czech Republic during the first week of October. The purpose of the workshop was to raise awareness of responsibility research and innovation and to present tools developed in the RRI Tools project. Training sessions took place in four regional cities, namely Ostrava (3 October), Olomouc (4 October), Liberec (5 October) and Brno (6 October) and successfully followed up the first workshop held in Plzeň earlier in June. The workshops were organised by the RRI Hub for the Czech Republic and lecturers were Miroslav Parvonič from Techmania Science Center and Jana Brabcová from Grafia, s.r.o.