Abstract
In this contribution, we explore the possibilities of Responsible Innovation (RI) to assess and support the engagement of businesses in the spectrum of Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) and, in particular, cooperatives to the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the firm level. We conduct a critical review of the academic literature on sustainable development and responsible innovation, focusing on the role of business to identify how firms in the spectrum of SSE can contribute through responsible innovation to the sustainable development agenda and how firms in the spectrum of SSE can benefit from it. Results suggest that firms can benefit from responsible innovation in the transformation of their business models. On the other hand, firms in the spectrum of SSE contribute to extending the scope of SDGs to business, not focusing on what cooperatives do by their nature (e.g., principles and values), but their contribution to key horizontal enablers (e.g., partnership and innovation) for the integration of firms in the sustainable development agenda. To our knowledge, this is the first time that the relationship between SSE firms and RI is assessed from the perspective of firms’ contribution to SDGs. Further research is needed to sophisticate the translation of particular tools developed in the framework of RI to firms in the spectrum of SSE and, in particular, cooperative firms.
Highlights
The contribution of the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) for an economy bent towards Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is widely acknowledged [1,2,3,4]
The definition of the SDGs represents an essential milestone for the orientation of public policies to the ‘grand societal challenges’ of our time
A widely accepted definition of von Schomberg [53] of RRI makes explicit the interactive and collective nature of responsible research and innovation, understood in terms of mutual responsibility between societal actors: “Responsible Research and Innovation is a transparent, in teractive process by which societal actors and innovators become mutually responsive to each other with a view to the acceptability, sustainability and societal desirability of the innovation process and its marketable products” (p. 63). This definition synthesizes the main emerging features of RRI [54]: it opens for discussion the broader purposes of scientific-technological activity; it institutionalizes the mechanisms of co-responsibility between different actors; it re-frames responsibility in response to a context in which the distributed nature of knowledge and the growing uncertainty and unpredictability diminish merely formalist and consequentialist principles [55]
Summary
The contribution of the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) for an economy bent towards Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is widely acknowledged [1,2,3,4]. There is a gap between firms’ general commitment to a set of shared goals as the SDGs and concrete actions oriented to their implementation at the level of firms To bridge this gap, we turn our attention to responsible innovation and its contribution to the implementation of the European agenda for sustainable development in Europe by 2030 (Section 4.1). Responsible innovation provides a framework that, calls for partnership, but results in innovation as a process of socio-technical integration among multiple stakeholders (Section 4.2) On these bases, we contend that responsible innovation provides an appropriate framework to bridge the gap between the orientation of business model innovations towards grand societal challenges at the level of firms and the engagement of the private sector in the implementation of the sustainable development agenda as a whole (Section 5). We suggest that it is in this context that the contribution of firms in the spectrum of SSE can be assessed and an agenda established whereby firms in the spectrum of SSE can benefit for the transformation of their business models to an economy bent towards SDGs (Section 6)
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