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Responsible Innovation in the US, UK and Denmark: Governance Landscapes

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Responsible Innovation 2

Abstract

This chapter explores the notion of responsible innovation (RI) as it is currently being imagined in policy and governance practice. It does this in the context of three different countries: the UK, US and Denmark. We ask how RI is being constituted within policy discussion. What is it understood as being? What kinds of actors are implicated in it? And what is its scope, or field of action? In exploring these questions we argue that responsible innovation is currently a largely international discourse, and that it remains unclear, from current policy discussion, how it should be put into practice. Though it is tied to a linear model of science and technology, in which both the process and outputs of scientific research are, through RI, imbued with responsibility, the actors involved and the fields in which they are assumed to operate are exceedingly general. As such, RI appears to be a fundamentally de-individualised process.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See project website: http://mef.ku.dk/forskning/fokusomraaderogprojekter/forskningenssamfundsmaessigeansvarlighed/. The SSR project is funded by The Danish Council for Independent Research: Social Sciences.

  2. 2.

    The web search therefore focused on English language discussion of responsible innovation.

  3. 3.

    See http://www.innovateuk.org.

  4. 4.

    Of course, both the UK and Denmark are part of the European Union, and therefore part of Commission discussion of and policy on responsible innovation. Anecdotal evidence from early empirical work suggests that this may in fact be influencing the context of discussions of responsibility through assumptions of a division of labour. In such assumptions, the EU is seen as a key player in the articulation of policy on emerging technology (and indeed is both a key funder of such technological research—Shapira and Wang (2010)—and, as we have outlined, the primary source of the language of responsible innovation), such that there is little sense in replicating these discussions. In national scientific and policy imaginations of responsible research and innovation, then, some responsibility for responsibility may itself be being delegated to supra-national institutional arrangements.

  5. 5.

    The present volume will, of course, offer many more practical instances of RI than we could readily find at the time of the research (2012); see Part III of this volume in particular.

  6. 6.

    CSR is now an enormous field, both in terms of academic research and as an industry in its own right, which we cannot do justice to here. The key point is that there is an extant tradition around responsibility, which emerged from industry but which has now been enthusiastically taken up by policy actors such as the European Commission (Midttun et al. 2012) as a means of governance, which so far seems not to have been tapped by work on responsible research and innovation. The degree to which it might be a helpful model for practices of RI, and the possibilities for successfully connecting to existing CSR activity and EC/government policy, deserves an essay in itself.

  7. 7.

    See http://www.unilever-esa.com/innovation/innovationinunilever/responsibleinnovation/.

  8. 8.

    See http://www.karimnetwork.eu/Pages/Responsible-Innovation.aspx.

  9. 9.

    Quoted from the website for the Franco-British Workshop on Responsible Innovation, http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/Franco-British-workshop-on,18791.

  10. 10.

    Similarly, critiques of public engagement—which is, in the UK, at least, a key forerunner of RI (Stilgoe 2012)—have pointed out the intermeshing of participation and neoliberal regimes (Thorpe and Gregory 2010).

  11. 11.

    Taken from http://www.medical-technologies.co.uk/support-for-innovation/responsible-innovation/.

  12. 12.

    In addition, the accuracy of the linear model is itself highly questionable: innovation rarely flows straightforwardly from science to technology to product, but rather forms a complex web in which many different factors interact (cf Joly and Kaufman 2008; see Chap. 2). Relying on this model as a way of structuring responsible innovation seems likely to create expectations that cannot be met.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Cecilie Glerup and Raffael Himmelsbach for their comments on and help with the preparation of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Sarah R. Davies & Maja Horst

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  1. Sarah R. Davies
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  2. Maja Horst
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Correspondence to Sarah R. Davies .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tilburg Law School, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Bert-Jaap Koops

  2. Philosophy section, Faculty of TPM, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Ilse Oosterlaken

  3. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Henny Romijn

  4. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Tsjalling Swierstra

  5. Philosophy Section, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Jeroen van den Hoven

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Davies, S.R., Horst, M. (2015). Responsible Innovation in the US, UK and Denmark: Governance Landscapes. In: Koops, BJ., Oosterlaken, I., Romijn, H., Swierstra, T., van den Hoven, J. (eds) Responsible Innovation 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17308-5_3

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