Responsible innovation scholarship: normative, empirical, theoretical, and engaged

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Notes

1 The year 2014 was an important one for responsible innovation both in policy terms and as an intellectual endeavor, as the initiation of this journal reflects. Responsible Innovation (RI) and its loose cognate Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) were emerging areas of policy interest, particularly at the European Commission and within the UK’s research councils (Von Schomberg 2011; Owen, von Schomberg, and Macnaghten 2021), and both had deeper roots in the US National Nanotechnology Initiative’s emphasis on responsible development (Fisher 2019a) and in the related approaches – developed in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and beyond – including constructive technology assessment (Rip and te Kulve 2008) and anticipatory governance (Barben et al. 2008). The academic community continued to build on these, and in 2013 a framework for RI was published (Stilgoe et al. 2013). Meanwhile, in 2014 the ‘Rome Declaration’ on RRI in Europe was published by the European Commission, providing significant funding for the emerging field.

2 In addition to being based in a wide range of traditional disciplines, such as Anthropology, Philosophy, Political Science, and Sociology, JRI authors also draw from numerous interdisciplinary fields and sub-fields, including but not limited to Applied Ethics, Cultural Studies, Engineering Ethics, Feminist Studies, Futures Studies, Indigenous Studies, Innovation Studies, Management Studies, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Technology, Policy Studies, STS, Sustainability Science, and Transition Studies.

3 The total number of articles coded and analyzed for this review is 304. This number excludes a few dozen more Editorials, Guest Editorial Introductions, and Book Reviews, some of which nevertheless feature in the editorial review’s narrative.

4 For instance, these have generally employed the lower-case terminology ‘responsible innovation.’

5 This (much abbreviated) list is meant to illustrate the rich diversity of conceptions and schools of thought oriented at the normative governance, practice, and assessment of knowledge-based innovation found in JRI. It is neither an exhaustive list of such instances, nor does it include any of the large number of conceptual dimensions (e.g. accountability, anticipation, inclusion, public values, reflexivity) or theoretical approaches and idioms (e.g., Civic Epistemology, Coproduction, Institutional Analysis and Development, Midstream Modulation, Social Construction of Technology, Technological Mediation) that JRI authors make use of.

6 Inductive coding of 304 published articles (including Research Articles, Perspectives, Discussion Papers, and Responses) was initially performed by Fisher, Smolka, and Nelson; Fisher then re-coded all articles deductively for consistency. Although we did not include Editorial Introductions and Guest Editorial Introductions in the coding exercise, we do reference some of these in our narrative presentation of the overall editorial review.

7 We regret that we could not include mention and discussion of all published articles. In-depth discussions of most articles published in JRI can be found in the numerous Editorial Introductions and Guest Editorial Introductions that have appeared in most issues of the journal’s first ten years.

8 That said, and as we show later (see Figure 1), all styles can and do interact with the others. Thus, Articulation and interpretation often co-exist in JRI publications, for example when they use empirical material to develop or assess an analytical framework (e.g., Glerup and Horst 2014; Politi and Grinbaum 2020; Shanley 2021).

9 Additional suggestions for research directions and agendas can be found in the Guest Editorial Introductions of recent JRI special issues (e.g., Doezema et al. 2019; van Oudheusden and Shelley-Egan 2021).