Table 1.
Responsible Innovation as Concept and Practice
| • Robust science and the presence of mechanisms for triangulation (methodological, spatial, and temporal) are at the core of responsible innovation. |
| • In addition to robust technical aspects, the presence of broad participation and extended peer-review in upstream (scientific design) and downstream science (execution, diffusion, and uptake of science) are essential. For innovation to be responsible, the scientific design and practice space must involve more than traditional technical experts. It must involve a broad array of experienced, engaged and enthusiastic members of the public, such as citizen scholars, patients, policymakers, and other knowledge end-users. This “opening up” of the hitherto cloistered scientific design and practice space produces scientific knowledge that is closely embedded with societal values, public interests, and end-user priorities, reflexively attends to broader outcomes emergent from scientific discovery, and thus, becomes socially robust and sustainable. |
| • Multiple, overlapping, and cross-checking layers of power and collective action that together shape a responsible innovation ecosystem create a knowledge commons that is “self-corrective” for socio-technical errors and professional blind spots, ensures against reliance on a single omnipresent scientific, ethics, or moral authority, and thus offers transparent, accountable, cosmopolitan, and self-governing distributed knowledge co-production by innovation actors. |
| • For a responsible 21st century knowledge society, concentrated power systems inherited from 20th century science, be they centered on technical, philosophical, social science, or bioethics aspects of life sciences and engineering, need to be replaced with distributed, and horizontally structured, knowledge co-production systems that promote epistemic plurality, collective incentives, and nested governance of science and its social and political dimensions. |
| • Knowledge producers' values and personalities, be they scientists', engineers', bioethicists', social scientists, humanists or artists, are shaped and co-constructed not only by individual agency, but also the social and political systems they are embedded in. Hence, one formidable task to bring these changes about is the introduction of new credit and rewards systems for achievements in science, engineering, social sciences and humanities that offer alternatives to one dimensional individual centric first authorships and attendant incentive systems. |