Creative teaching methods for imagining the future of technology in farming: storytelling for responsible transitions

The importance of responsible innovation in organization’s innovative activity is well recognized and has inspired a wealth of research in finding the dimensions of responsible innovations. The unpredictable consequences of the innovations are clearly understood, but at the current situation exists the focus to analyze the social, economical, ecological and ethical results after the launch of the innovation. Theoretical analysis of responsible innovation concept reveals few observations. First, responsible innovation concept is grounded by four main approaches: business insight, organizational cultural profile, involvement of stakeholders, and structural stage-gate process. Second, the conception of responsible innovation is the balanced entirety of the innovative activity development, when decisions are based on the stage-gate principle, involvement of stakeholders, and assessment through the organizational ethical-cultural profile in order to evaluate social, ecological, economical and ethical responsibilities for the society and environment. Third, the concept of responsible innovation is grounded by the open innovation model, which integrates the principles of stagegate, social and inclusive innovations. Fourth, the multidisciplinary concept of responsible innovation requires analyzing social, economical, ecological and ethical parameters that can be assured by using the principles of anticipation, inclusion and reflection.

In the foreword to Responsible Innovation: Managing the Responsible Emergence of Science and Innovation in Society, the concept of responsible innovation is pitched as a necessary counterpoint to “innovation’s systemic irresponsibility,” an undertaking that aims to “nudge [technologies’] trajectories in various ways toward responsible, desirable futures” <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[1, p. xii]</xref> . Within the leading journal <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Responsible Innovation</i> , the concept is often treated as synonymous with responsible research and innovation (RRI); indeed, the European Commission suggests an overlapping set of aims in its description of RRI as a “comprehensive approach” to developing research methods and new technologies, one that:

The concept of Responsible Innovation (RI) occupies a central place in the discourse on science and technology, especially in the context of the European Union (EU) but also within academia. This concept is guided by the idea of steering science and technology towards societally desirable outcomes, particularly in response to normative objectives such as Sustainable Development Goals. Visions of RI typically propose that to innovate responsibly requires a permanent commitment to be anticipatory, reflective, inclusively deliberative, and responsive. They also emphasize the need for open access, gender equality, science education, ethical standard in conducting experiments, and democratic governance.However, the societal purpose of RI fundamentally conflicts with the imperative of maximizing economic growth inherent in today’s innovation climate. This conflict points to a crisis in which innovation struggles to serve public interests insofar private interests continue to be prioritized. The magnitude of this crisis is also reflected within the RI literature itself, where the political ambition to exceed the privatization wave is summoned to a techno-economic concept of innovation. This issue of NOvation – Critical Studies of Innovation brings into question to what extent innovation necessarily relates to the market, whether it is possible to develop an alternative concept of innovation that is separated from economic ends, and how we can conceptualize, for example, a political understanding of innovation. What really is innovation? While all seven contributions share the aspiration to critically reflect on these questions, they each offer a distinct and original perspective in discussing the relation between innovation, technology, politics, economics, and responsibility.

ABSTRACTThe contribution of the field of science and technology studies (STS) to mainstream sociology has so far been slim because of a misunderstanding about what it means to provide a social explanation of a piece of science or of an artefact. The type of explanation possible for religion, art or popular culture no longer works in the case of hard science or technology. This does not mean, it is argued, that science and technology escapes sociological explanation, but that a deep redescription of what is a social explanation is in order. Once this misunderstanding has been clarified, it becomes interesting to measure up the challenge raised by STS to the usual epistemologies social sciences believed necessary for their undertakings. The social sciences imitate the natural sciences in a way that render them unable to profit from the type of objectivity found in the natural sciences. It is argued that by following the STS lead, social sciences may start to imitate the natural sciences in a very different fashion. Once the meanings of ‘social’ and of ‘science’ are reconfigured, the definition of what a ‘social science’ is and what it can do in the political arena is considered. Again it is not by imitating the philosophers of science's ideas of what is a natural science that sociology can be made politically relevant.

We argue combining STS Postures, positioning one’s body to be humble, open, critical, and action-oriented, with the responsible innovation and research framework (RRI) could help educators effectively translate Science and Technology Studies (STS) for undergraduate STEM students. While important efforts to intervene in undergraduate STEM education exist, integrating socio-technical systems thinking remains a challenge. STS Postures enables a more skill-driven, action-oriented approach to STS, which helps students make the abstract concepts of RRI and STS theory more concrete. This approach is activated by STS Thinker Skills: skills, as well as mindsets and behaviors that inspire students to be reflexive systems thinkers and equip them to be change agents within their chosen fields. We provide an example of what curriculum like this might look like from our work within a Science, Technology and Society program for undergraduate STEM majors.

This article analyzes the varied niches of an emerging academic field, Science and Technology Studies (STS), as a means of understanding intellectual and professional development. As a new, upstart entity in the established and inertial field of academia, STS has carved out a successful and expanding niche in the ecology of higher education via a variety of unique intellectual and institutional strategies. By adapting and reconfiguring organizational and professional structures of traditional liberal arts, the case of STS exposes three main themes in the organization of knowledge and higher education: reinvention, accounting, and professionalism. STS scholars endeavor to reorganize the distribution and organization of knowledge turfs, which often involve idiosyncratic, symbiotic, or competitive relationships with sciences, social sciences, and/or humanities. This often creates dilemmas regarding how to account for scholarly work using new, divergent, or incommensurable merit criteria or professional values. The article concludes with empirical analyses of the emergence and content of STS departments throughout the world and of Social Studies of Science, the flagship journal of the field. Data and evidence were gleaned from a variety of semistructured interviews with STS scholars, archival sources, and detailed citation records. As STS continues to grow and develop with its diffuse and eclectic foci, this raises questions of whether and how the field should or will be coordinated intellectually or professionally. These multivalent professional logics and values are sources of both vitality and tension in STS and illuminate larger issues of professional and intellectual organizational strategy in developing fields and realms of knowledge.

Responsible innovation is an emerging social movement, concept and practice in governance of science and technology. Yet, responsible innovation cannot be fully understood without its historical origins and the gravitational pulls that are impacting its development. Responsible innovation is emerging against a backdrop of: (1) bioethics scholarship that has been transformed over the past two decades such that a major wing of the discipline has adopted a utilitarian science enabler functionalist role situated in immediate proximity (and perhaps too close) to the science and technology actors; and (2) the field of science and technology studies (STS), which has traditionally offered critical insights into the backstage of science and technology, deconstructing the ways in which context, power and politics play an ever-present role in scientific knowledge co-production. In in this chapter I propose that for responsible innovation to evolve in a manner that is as socially responsive and responsible as the science it seeks to shape, a new epistemic layer of inquiry should be added, termed ethics-of-ethics. Recognition of ethics-of-ethics would foster greater reflexivity on the importance of processes of knowing, not only in natural science and technology, but also in social sciences and humanities. Such nested governance and independent cross-checking of knowledge co-production in both science and ethics would ensure that scientist, social scientist, humanists and ethicist are held accountable through transparency, for example, in the epistemological choices made, the upstream agendas created and the ends to which socio-technical analyses are intended to serve.

‘Responsible innovation’ is an increasingly popular term, but it is by no means clear what exactly this term refers to, nor how responsible innovation can or should be approached. This chapter provides an introduction to the landscape of responsible innovation, drawing from the contributions to this volume and an emerging body of literature. First, the concept of responsible innovation is explored: what does ‘responsible innovation’ refer to? The concept can be seen as an ideal, of incorporating social and ethical values or aspects in the innovation process, and as a project, a joint enterprise of an increasingly large community of people who want to bring us closer to this ideal. Next, approaches to responsible innovation are discussed: how can we go about innovating responsibly? While all approaches seem to have in common a key role for stakeholder engagement, one can distinguish two broad types of approaches to make innovation in a certain context more responsible. There is a product approach, characterised by a focus on developing some kind of output—a method, a framework, or guidelines; and a process approach, focused on developing some kind of procedure, usually with an element of self-learning. Subsequently, the current landscape of responsible innovation is briefly sketched: who is doing what in which areas? The chapter ends with explaining the structure of this edited volume and a brief tour through the chapters, which together provide a rich body of work that anticipates, reflects, deliberates, and responds to the challenges of responsible innovation.

This dissertation is located at the intersection of stakeholder theory, entrepreneurship and innovation research and demonstrates that the concept of Responsible Innovation (RI), with its premise of early stakeholder engagement in innovation processes, is of immense relevance to entrepreneurial organizations, especially with regard to uncertainties in disruptive technology development. Part 1 of this dissertation pioneers the connection of RI to entrepreneurship research. The differing interpretations of RI and three core aspects are explored: design innovation, normative ends and collaborative reflection. After laying out this RI scheme, the notion of entrepreneurship is examined in light of this construct. Furthermore, operationalization strategies of RI in entrepreneurial organizations are outlined on a conceptual level and in practice, with a focus on stakeholder engagement as the key element. Moreover, the vital role played by stakeholders in entrepreneurial organizations and their influence on uncertainties of innovation processes are indicated. In Part 2 of this dissertation, this role of stakeholders is scrutinized more closely. It identifies the reduction of uncertainties as a core driver of stakeholder engagement activities. A mixed-methods approach was utilized. In the qualitative study, nine in-depth interviews were conducted and analyzed. A structure equation model approach was adopted for the quantitative study; 119 questionnaires were completed by managers in the field of advanced biotechnology. Part 2 evidences the vital role of stakeholder engagement in terms of reducing technological, commercial, social and organizational uncertainty during innovation processes in disruptive technology development.

The issues of responsible and sustainable innovations have been attracting the growing attention of the ranks of scholars in recent years. However, this amassing productivity in the field has not been mapped and profiled thoroughly, yet. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to map the research output related to the concepts of responsible and sustainable innovations with the method of research profiling. The analysis consists of three components: general research profiling, subject area profiling and topic profiling conducted with the use of Scopus database. The research process is directed at answering three research questions: (1) who are the main contributors within the scholarly community? why? so what? (2) how is the research output distributed among subject areas? why? so what? (3) what are the central topics and issues discussed within the research field? why? so what? First of all, key contributing countries, research institutions, journals, and authors are identified in order to characterize the scholarly community working in the field. Secondly, research output is profiled through the prism of respective subject areas. This type of profiling aims at discovering varieties among key journals, authors and core references distributed across various subject areas. Thirdly, topic analysis is conducted in order to point out most crucial aspects studied in the body of literature in the field. The research sample consists of 1083 publications indexed in Scopus database, including the phrases ‘responsible innovation’ or ‘sustainable innovation’ within their titles, keywords, and abstracts (topic search). The findings from the general research profiling confirm the growing interest of academia in exploring and investigating the issues of responsible and sustainable innovations. The leading contributors in the field are scholars and research institutions from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Dutch universities and research centers occupy three top three positions in regard to the number of publications. Among them, Delft University of Technology is the unquestionable leader. Journal of Cleaner Production and Journal of Responsible Innovation are found to be the most prolific and highly recognized source titles in the field. Subject area profiling shows a relatively high level of interrelatedness among the four leading subject areas i.e., Business, Management and Accounting, Engineering, Social Sciences, and Environmental Science in regard to authors, source titles and core references. Topic profiling indicates two leading thematic streams in the research field focused on the features and core aspects of responsible and sustainable innovations, and the relationships of the concept with people (human, humans), research, ethics, and technology. Discussion of research findings is focused around comparing and contrasting three overlapping concepts (i.e., responsible research and innovation, responsible innovation, and sustainable innovation), providing the critical assessment of the reasons for the scholarly research to have developed along with certain patterns and identifying unexplored aspects or possible future avenues of research.

We examine the evidence for the claim of an ‘ontological turn’ in science and technology studies (STS). Despite an increase in references to ‘ontology’ in STS since 1989, we show that there has not so much been an ontological turn as multiple discussions deploying the language of ontology, consisting of many small movements that have changed the landscape within STS and beyond. These movements do not point to a shared STS-wide understanding of ontology, although it can be seen that they do open up STS to neighbouring disciplines. Three main thematic complexes are identified in this literature: constructivism and realism; instruments and classification; and the social sciences and the humanities. The introduction of ontology into the long-running constructivism-realism debate can be considered as an acknowledgement on both sides that objects are real (i.e. pre-existing the situation) and constructed at the same time. The second thematic complex focuses on the role of instruments and classification in establishing not only relations of heterogeneity, but also of stability. The third thematic complex broadens the debate and actively seeks to promote an STS-driven ontological turn for research concerned with the humanities and the social sciences more generally. This study is based on both quantitative and qualitative interpretations of the literature.

Background: With the expanding scope of scientific and technological discourse within psychiatry, social scientists need new theoretical tools to grapple with the complex links between psychiatry, science and society. Benefit may be afforded through engagement with the discipline of science and technology studies (STS), which is concerned explicitly with the relationships between science and society.Aims: To highlight existing engagements between STS and the sociology of (mental) health, and to encourage researchers to consider ways in which insights from these traditions may be developed further through interdisciplinary debate and analysis.Methods: Some of the key works in STS and the sociology of mental illness that use the empirical or theoretical writings of the other were reviewed and appraised.Results: Whilst it is clear that some research synthesizing insights from STS and the sociology of mental health exists, this is currently limited.Conclusions: Sociologists and others concerned with longstanding and emergent issues in mental health might usefully familiarize themselves with some work in STS. A new sociology of psychiatric knowledge production and application represents an important way forward.

In this article we introduce the concept of responsible innovation into entrepreneurship research, present ideas on how to operationalise it, and share notions on operational issues from the debate on advanced biotechnology and the bio-economy. Therefore, we first examine the role of entrepreneurship as an agent of innovation and connect it to responsible innovation. Second, introducing the 'prism of responsible innovation' as a moderator for the entrepreneurial process in converting opportunity into innovation, we propose a theoretical framework of how the concept of responsible innovation could be integrated into the entrepreneurial process. Finally, we present insight from the debate on advanced biotechnologies regarding potential operationalisation strategies for responsible innovation.

While the concept of Responsible Innovation is increasingly common among researchers and policy makers, it is still unknown what it means in a business context. This study aims to identify which aspects of Responsible Innovation are conceptually similar and dissimilar from social- and sustainable innovation. Our conceptual analysis is based on literature reviews of responsible-, social-, and sustainable innovation. The insights obtained are used for conceptualising Responsible Innovation in a business context. The main conclusion is that Responsible Innovation differs from social- and sustainable innovation as it: (1) also considers possible detrimental implications of innovation, (2) includes a mechanism for responding to uncertainties associated with innovation and (3) achieves a democratic governance of the innovation. However, achieving the latter will not be realistic in a business context. The results of this study are relevant for researchers, managers and policy makers who are interested in responsible innovation in the business context.

Agriculture is undergoing a technology revolution supported by policy-makers around the world. While smart technologies will play an important role in achieving enhanced productivity and greater eco-efficiency, critics have suggested that a consideration of social impacts is being side-lined. Research illustrates that some agricultural practitioners are concerned about using certain technologies. Indeed, some studies argue that agricultural societies may be changed, or ‘re-scripted’, in undesirable ways, and there is precedent to suggest that wider society may be concerned about radical new technologies. We therefore encourage policy-makers, funders, technology companies, and researchers to consider the views of both farming communities and wider society. In agriculture, the concept of responsible innovation has not been widely considered, although two recent papers have made useful suggestions. We build on these interventions by arguing that key dimensions of responsible innovation - anticipation, inclusion, reflexivity, and responsiveness - should be applied to this fourth agricultural revolution. We argue, however, that ideas in responsible innovation should be further developed in order to make them relevant and robust for emergent agri-tech, and further that frameworks should be tested in practice to see if they can actively shape innovation trajectories. In making suggestions on how to construct a more comprehensive framework for responsible innovation in agriculture, we call for: (i) a more systemic approach that maps and attends to the wider ecology of innovations associated with this fourth agricultural revolution; (ii) a broadening of notions of ‘inclusion’ in responsible innovation to account better for diverse and already existing spaces of participation in agri-tech, and (iii) greater testing of frameworks in practice to see if they are capable of influencing the innovation process.