Abstract
The urgency of current social challenges is driving new approaches to framing and funding research, development, and innovation. The “mission-oriented” approach framing the EU’s New Horizons funding program is the latest institutional response to the pressing needs of large system transformations we are facing. We view the likely targets of mission-oriented programs as dynamic entities requiring both adaptive, inclusive responses, and anticipatory exploration. We demonstrate how participatory foresight methods provide an essential forum and process for the expression of plural, socio-technological imaginaries. As citizens and other stakeholder groups have demonstrated their myriad capacities to contribute to research and innovation agenda-setting processes in future-oriented citizen dialogs, we argue that such methods are the essential compliment to the mission-oriented framework coming into play. Participatory foresight engages citizens in critical thinking and creative activities to articulate the evolution of socio-technological issues over an extended time horizon, seeking diverse perspectives on what goals and priorities will come to define “missions.” Utilizing outputs from two recent projects, we argue that participatory foresight methods can play an essential role in bridging citizen needs with policy requirements, and will increase the reflexivity of innovation systems that invest the needed time and resources into exploring the depth of multi-actor interests and intersections. Finally, we outline possible impact pathways demonstrating how these “bottom-up” contributions could be integrated into the development of challenge-led innovation priorities.
Highlights
Finding solutions for the long-term Grand Challenges that face humanity remains a key driving force in developing new approaches to the organizing and funding of responsible research and innovation
We present the results from two recent projects that incorporated bottom-up participatory foresight methods to engage public discourse with macro-scale system transformation: CIMULACT3 which approached the transition to sustainable societies using citizen visioning, and BioKompass4 employing future-oriented citizen dialogs coupled with participatory narrative generation to build a multi-stakeholder understanding of the “bioeconomy” and thereby foster transformation toward it
Given the emphasis that CIMULACT placed on the need for localized knowledge as an input to contextually sensitive solution finding, we suggest that these areas—little mentioned via expert-based foresight, and seemingly unaddressed in innovation policy at the time—highlight the types of contributions that direct citizen engagement and structured participatory foresight can provide
Summary
Finding solutions for the long-term Grand Challenges that face humanity remains a key driving force in developing new approaches to the organizing and funding of responsible research and innovation. The “mission-oriented” framing of the EU’s New Horizons funding scheme is one of the latest institutional embodiments of the pressing challenges we are facing in order to provide sustainable perspectives to future generations. The concept of “mission-orientation” has placed public funding for RDI into challenge-led innovation framework [43], and shifted criteria by which projects are formulated and selected. The concept argues valiantly for increasing public engagement in R&I governance and processes (e.g., priority-setting, collaborative innovation) in order to improve citizens’ understanding of the missions’ targets and urgency, and to bolster “demand-triggering,” rather than reactive, innovation agendas [36, 86].
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