Assessment of Responsible Innovation: Methods and Practices on Free Download

Assessment of Responsible Innovation: Methods and Practices is edited by Emad Yaghmaei and Ibo van de Poel, both well known in the field of Responsible innovation.

As regular readers will know, the EU has funded a long series of projects aimed at building tools and tool kits to help various sectors implement Responsible Innovation Approaches. This collection presents many of these tools while aligning aims with the United Nations sustainable development goals.

The book is divided into three parts.

Part 1. Reflections on Responsible Innovation.

Part 1 offers thoughts and perspectives based on personal experience from working within or alongside some of these projects. We find a historically grounded overview of different approaches and views of responsibility and democracy (and their relationship with scientific processes), and some interesting examples of approaches to networking responsible practices taken across the world.

Part 2. Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in Companies.

Part 2 offers 4 chapters that raise lots of interesting questions and issues regarding the relationship between RRI and Corporate Social Responsibility, obstacles and drivers for RRI implementation, costs and benefits from following and RRI approach and possible roles for voluntary standards. 

Part 3. Responsible Innovation Assessment.

This third and final part of the book presents a compendium of different approaches, methods and metrics for assessing responsible innovation practices spread across 8 chapters.

The chapters raise a host of questions regarding which indicators and metrics might be useful if trying to measure effectiveness of RI and RRI processes, which types of assessment could be carried out, opportunities and challenges faced, the volume and depth possible for integrating practices, as well as discussion of pitfalls, all set alongside a series of proposals and a host of suggestions for methodologies that could be followed.

Several of the EU projects I have posted about in the past are mentioned, with their tool-sets and approaches explained and analyzed in easy-to-understand terms. There are some interesting points of focus too, from ICT and digital transformation to employee creativity and reflexive skills.  

The Collection

This collection brings together a broad spectrum of approaches that would otherwise find themselves scattered across project websites, offering the reader an overview of what could be seen as different practices that have grown out of different interests and focusses.

The editors have set out to bring these developments together, and have succeeded in doing so in a very readable and interesting way.   The book is a kind of overview of tool-kits and approaches and practices, a fine companion for anyone interested in Responsible Innovation. Download it here.

The Journal of Responsible Innovation goes Open Access

Responsible Innovation

As regular readers will know, one of my main philosophical interests in life is related to innovation and responsibility. My posts on this blog, as well as my work collaborating with the Bassetti Foundation (an organization that the editorial team here have a close working relationship with) are all in some way related to questions about innovation and technology.

My interests come from a background in sociology, so they tend to be about the relationship between society and innovation, not about the innovations themselves. And I don’t want to suggest that there is a right and wrong to all of this. Innovation is neither wrong, nor necessarily right.

My fundamental question is really quite simple, although it comes in several parts:

Can innovation be more or less responsible? If it can be, how could it be steered to become more responsible if that is what we wanted to do?

Obviously then we have to think about what responsible might mean, what is responsible for you may not be responsible to me. And what is responsible today in one place, may not be responsible either tomorrow or in another place today.

I have been fortunate over the last 15 years that I have been working in this field to have met lots of people who share the same interests. Many are University professors, or work in governmental positions, think tanks and a host of other organizations, and there are a lot of publications related to my question. And of course there are lots of other more intricate questions generated by lots of different perspectives, positions and expertise.

The Journal

One of the major fonts has been the Journal of Responsible Innovation, and the new year brings a joyous gift, the journal has become Open Access. Not only are all new publications open access, but also all of the back catalogue.

If you have time and would like to know (a lot) more, I have been on the Editorial Board since the journal was founded and have reviewed every article published to date, all of which you can find here.

It’s still quite a read, but this collection of reviews offers an overview of the development of thinking in the field over the last 7 years.

To celebrate, I am going to dedicate a couple of months to writing about open access, open source and open science, and I will be putting up links to various articles from the Journal and beyond.

The Journal of Responsible Innovation is an academic journal with a twist. As the website demonstrates:

JRI invites three kinds of written contributions: research articles of 6,000 to 10,000 words in length, inclusive of notes and references, that communicate original theoretical or empirical investigations; perspectives of approximately 2,000 words in length that communicate opinions, summaries, or reviews of timely issues, publications, cultural or social events, or other activities; and pedagogy, communicating in appropriate length experience in or studies of teaching, training, and learning related to responsible innovation in formal (e.g., classroom) and informal (e.g., museum) environments.

So we can find people that we know from the blog writing film reviews (Stevienna de Saille), MOOC reviews (from myself), and reports from workshops (Jack Stilgoe). Not to mention hundreds of academic articles.

This is a high-level journal, now offering articles from world renowned figures, Open Access, for FREE.

Fill your boots!

Part 10, The End of the Book Series

I hope you enjoyed the series and the book. My thanks and congratulations go to everyone who followed. I would be pleased to hear about your experiences through the comments section below.

In this final post I hope to draw the final message of the book together.

Aim of the Book and Series

As noted in the introduction to the book, its aim was to open a discussion that sees narration and aesthetics as central to daily decision-making practices in small scale production processes, be those artisanal working or scientific working situations.

The idea is that people working in such environments learn not only the technicalities of their work, but also co-construct the narrative through which decisions are made and possibilities are granted or excluded. This could be described as the narrative of doing things right, a concept that is constructed within the place of work through daily work talk. It is negotiated and fluid, refers to a shared understanding of a narrative framework and is recognized and codified through the appreciation of the values seen in the product. The narrative allows the framing of the decision-making process and the sharing of a language that allows thos working in the process to talk about it and share their appreciation.

In the case of craftwork, the shared understanding can be seen as expressed through an appreciation of the functional beauty of the work. Each object has its own functional beauty, defined by different criteria and affected by the amount of resources available, objectives and resources, meaning that the appreciation of beauty cannot be transferred from one to another without modification. No two processes are the same, as resources are different, meaning that the construction of their appreciation must also be different, even if the framework through which it is drawn in terms of the narrative is similar.

I call this a form of poiesis intensive production, this shared understanding of aesthetics is a driving force within the decision-making process, as its appreciation leads to the construction of networks of both colleagues and suppliers of materials, technology and tools, ideas and information, that are necessary for the production process.

To summarize; ideas of responsibility, narrative and the aim of the process may be related, I would say intertwined, and talked about in everyday chat at work.

Although in the science lab the language may be different, precision is discussed more than beauty, there are similarities in that precision is functional precision, as beauty is functional beauty. Functional precision relates to purpose and function. It is one facet of a functional goal, very much as beauty is for the upholsterer.

Overview of the Book

The book is divided into seven self-standing chapters, each representing a narrative from a particular perspective. It can be broadly seen as divided into two larger sections. The first section offers a representation of the current state of the art in RI research. Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 are all related to this construction, narrating the development of the concept of RI from different perspectives. The construction of this broader narrative (my own RI narrative) leads to the second section, based upon an argument (outlined above) that sees the sharing of a concept of functional beauty in terms of its position within a workplace narrative and its relevance to decision-making processes.

The second section is split into three chapters, the first offering an overview of methodology and argument, followed by two case studies. The first case study involves a furniture restorer in South Manchester (UK) and the second a surgeon developing 3D bio-printing techniques in Utrecht (NL).