Excellent and responsible research characterized by both social and practical relevance

Is Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) only a freaky idea, born in Brussels, and made for researchers who have loads of time to spend? Or more serious: Are we successful at involving different stakeholders in the debate on emerging technologies? How and at what stage of the research process should they be involved? These questions are a core part of the European challenge of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI).

Photo: MIWF/Reiner Zensen

As if to answer them, end of February North-Rhine Westphalia’s Minister for Innovation, Science and Research, Ms Svenja Schulze, has awarded four excellent...

In the beginning of July the RRI Tools project took on a great challenge in Denmark; to engage 130.000 participants at the annual Roskilde festival in responsible research and innovation. The aim was to create fun and engaging experiences and memories that facilitated reflection about each individual's role in science and society.
 
Roskilde festival is a valuable platform for communication because of its huge impact and focus on responsibility. The festival annually hosts 130,000 people from all over Europe and has a great focus on societal impact and sustainability. Since 1994 the organizers have been constantly trying to reduce the environmental impact and make a change by donating profits to humanitarian purposes, selling fair trade products, using renewable energy sources, aiming at a maximum level of waste recycling and informing about environmentally friendly behaviour.

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Involving various stakeholders in creating posters for Roskilde festival helps the Danish Hub to put responsible innovation at the top of its agenda.

Conducting Responsible Research and Innovation is all about involvement. Involving co-workers, involving citizens, involving people from different fields of science than your own and involving policymakers and other stakeholders.

But involvement can be difficult. How do you make people from different fields come together, talk and contribute in a way that makes sense to everybody? Sometimes we want to hear the voices of people who are so different that they – even though they use similar words –...

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is a notoriously complex governance framework for research and innovation (R&I). It encompasses various aspects, better known by their EC-name as key dimensions: governance, ethics, gender, public engagement, science education and open access. Multifarious as this list may be, the core idea that distinguishes so-called Responsible R&I from R&I simpliciter is that the former is done with an eye to societal challenges, and that in doing so it takes on board the lessons of decades of research on the governance of science, the relationship between science and society and, more specifically, the role of science in solving complex societal issues.

These lessons, again, are of course manifold, but in short they can be boiled down to a relatively short list of RRI-commandments: include, reflect, adapt and be open!