Technology Assessment for Responsible Innovation

Abstract

The ideas of ‘responsible development’ in the scientific-technological advance and of ‘responsible innovation’ in the field of new products, services and systems have been discussed for some years now with increasing intensity. Some crucial ideas of Technology Assessment (TA) are an essential part of these debates which leads to the thesis is that TA is one of the main roots of Responsible Innovation. This can be seen best in the effort which has recently been spent to early and upstream engagement at the occasion of new and emerging science and technology. However, Responsible innovation adds explicit ethical reflection to TA and merges both into approaches to shaping technology and innovation: Indeed, the field of the ethics of responsibility and its many applications to the scientific and technological advance is the second major root of Responsible Innovation. Responsible Innovation brings together TA with its experiences on assessment procedures, actor involvement, foresighting and evaluation with engineering ethics, in particular under the framework of responsibility. The chapter describes both, TA and engineering ethics, as origins of ‘Responsible Innovation’.