Responsible retrospection: adapting responsible innovation to the liminal innovation of ICTs

ABSTRACT

ICTs are ubiquitous in today's digitised societies, but Responsible Innovation (RI) approaches are ill-equipped to address the liminal nature of ICT innovation. ICTs remain malleable after their diffusion. As a result, they are often in use and in development at the same time. This liminality has allowed developers to innovate by updating established ICTs and to incorporate information about the use of ICTs into their innovation. This clashes with RI approaches, which focus on emerging technologies and anticipation. We suggest three adaptations to overcome the gap between RI's anticipatory approach and the liminal innovation of ICTs: (1) RI must broaden its scope to include both emerging and established ICTs. (2) RI must focus on how developers monitor their in-use ICTs, as this information greatly influences innovation. And (3) RI must reflect on how to retrospectively care for issues with in-use ICTs, now that it is possible to update in-use ICTs.

KEYWORDS:

• Liminal innovation
• responsible innovation
• ICTs
• artificial intelligence
• monitoring

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to the constructive feedback from the anonymous reviewers. This has significantly helped to improve our manuscript and enhance the quality of our work. We would also like to thank Dr. Eelco Herder and prof. Dr. Arjen de Vries for their insightful comments during the writing process.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For the sake of scope, we limit ourselves to RI in this article, although RI is by no means the only framework that is used to make ICTs more responsible. One of the other main frameworks used in relation to ICTs is value-sensitive design. See van den Hoven (2013) for an overview of value-sensitive design and how it compares to RI (for ICTs).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the Radboud University.