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Responsibility navigator for research and innovation

“Responsible Research and Innovation” is being emphasized more and more. Research and innovation need to become more responsive to societal challenges and expectations. But what exactly is responsible research and innovation? And how can you encourage it? To address these questions, Prof. Stefan Kuhlmann, Dr Gonzalo Ordóñez and Bart Walhout of the University of Twente (STePS research group) and colleagues have developed a “Responsibility Navigator”.

The Responsibility Navigator provides support to policy makers and managers to assist them in consciously facilitating responsibility. The basic principle is that different groups in society, in research institutes and in the business world often have different ideas about what ‘responsibility’ means (and what it doesn’t mean). The Responsibility Navigator has been designed to facilitate constructive and productive discussions on this topic.

The core of the Navigator consists of ten principles and conditions: “Inclusion; Moderation; Deliberation; Modularity and Flexibility; Subsidiarity; Adaptability; Capabilities; Capacities; Institutional Entrepreneurship; Transparency and Rule of Law”. Each principle is defined and illustrated by fictitious cases. These are all accompanied by questions commonly posed by actors with an interest in navigating research and innovation institutes in a conscious effort to address issues of ‘responsibility’.

Reflection tool

The Responsibility Navigator is intended to provide guidance and to serve as a reflection tool for governing bodies in research and innovation institutes. These may include the executive boards of universities, the management and strategic divisions in businesses, programme boards at funding bodies such as the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), government ministries charged with research and innovation, etc. In short, bodies and agencies that influence the management and conduct of research and innovation. These groups can use the Responsibility Navigator to engage with the public debate, to forge links with civil society actors, to interface with governance frameworks and to create favourable conditions for research endeavours and innovation.

Grant of €3m from the EU

The Responsibility Navigator is a product of the ‘Res-AGorA’ FP7 project (http://res-agora.eu/about/), which has received €3m in funding from the European Commission. The international Res-AGorA team designed the Navigator by drawing on inspiration from more than thirty in-depth empirical case studies of debates and conflicts on the topic of ‘responsible’ innovation. Five high-level stakeholder workshops were devoted to discussing and fine-tuning the Navigator. These workshops were attended by more than 80 policy-makers from leading European institutes and agencies. Many of the participants, including representatives from the Research Council of Norway (a sister organization of NWO), were highly enthusiastic about the approach and intend to put it to use. Interviews with workshop participants can be found at http://res-agora.eu/video-interviews-about-rri/. The European Commission’s current Horizon 2020 programme is an obvious choice for implementation, as this programme includes Responsible Research and Innovation as a general objective. The Responsibility Navigator was therefore presented together with other RRI projects at a joint final conference in Brussels on 14-15 January 2016. (http://res-agora.eu/news/go4-joint-final-conference/).

Education

The Department StePS (Institute IGS) provides education on aspects of responsibility Navigator in many subjects; Technology and Liberal Arts & Sciences ATLAS and the Master program Philosophy of Science (PSTS), Public Administration and Nanotechnology.

drs. M.M.J. van Hillegersberg - Hofmans (Martine)
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