Enacting anticipatory heuristics: a tentative methodological proposal for steering responsible innovation

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, various normative frameworks that aim to promote more responsible governance of research and innovation in terms of better aligning with society's demands and expectations have emerged. Among the common aspects of these normative frameworks and proposals is the reliance on foresight and/or anticipation as a key interventive dimension or instrument. The article reviews the main challenges to which anticipation has been explicitly or implicitly directed and the respective methodological approaches that have been associated with them. In doing so, the article diagnoses a fragmentation in the methodological treatment of the different challenges. Against this fragmentation, a multi-foresight methodology is proposed. The proposed methodology not only addresses the fragmentation problem by embracing the different challenges posed to foresight/anticipation for promoting more socio-politically responsible technoscientific and innovation practices, but also aims to minimise the uncritical reification of futures.

KEYWORDS:

• Foresight
• responsible innovation
• methods
• RRI
• technology assessment

Acknowledgments

This article was partially written during a research stay at the the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). The author would like to thank especially to Knut H. Sørensen for his kind insights on early drafts of this work. Any inaccuracies remain the responsibility of the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Long historical-conceptual roots nourish, support, and inspire AG, RRI, RI, and TA. For more on the origins of these frameworks, see: Barben et al. (2008) and Karinen and Guston (2009) on AG; von Schomberg (2013) and Owen, Macnaghten, and Stilgoe (2012) on RRI; Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten (2013) and Owen and Pansera (2019) on RI; and Grunwald (2019) and Grunwald (2009) on TA.

2 The drivers constituting the fragmentation in the problematisation of the dimensions of STIs are heterogeneous. While exploring the causes of this fragmentation would be a necessary and interesting task, this article is limited to a tentative diagnosis of its existence. Ultimately, the aim is to encourage the design and adoption of anticipatory processes that are not a priori limited to problematising a particular subset of the issues raised by STIs. All this is done in awareness that no method is a panacea. Rather, it is a matter of problematising which “affordances of critique” intervening processes enact.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the Spanish State Research Agency under Project Grant PID2020-114279RB-I00, and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund under Grant BES-2016-079192.

Notes on contributors

Sergio Urueña

Sergio Urueña received his PhD in Philosophy, Science and Values in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU. His research focuses on epistemological and methodological issues related to operationalizing anticipation to promote more socio-politically robust research and innovation governance dynamics. His interests include STS, responsible innovation, anticipation and futures studies, and political philosophy of technology.