Challenge-driven innovation and responsible innovation: dynamics and disconnects explored through the UK’s industrial biotechnology sector

ABSTRACT

Recent years have seen the uptake of challenge and mission-oriented innovation policies in Europe, including the UK. These developments have been paralleled by variable support for responsible research and innovation (RRI) policies. This article explores the adoption of challenge-driven innovation strategies in the UK's industrial biotech (IB) sector alongside RRI expectations, examining the effects and implications. Drawing on analysis of IB policy documents and interview data, we argue that the articulation of innovation aims in terms of grand challenges provides innovation stakeholders with new possibilities to re-frame the value and purposes of controversial technologies such as synthetic biology, and to downplay or ignore the anticipation of potential impacts and risks. The conflation of innovation objectives and grand societal challenges has afforded new opportunities to construct representations of societal consensus and alignment, while avoiding the participatory practices on which shared understandings and nuanced exploration of societal expectations would normally be based.

KEYWORDS:

• Industry innovation
• Industrial biotechnology
• Synthetic biology
• Challenge-driven innovation
• Responsible innovation
• Anticipation

Introduction

Anticipation of the future effects and benefits of emerging technologies is a central element of research and innovation policies and plays a key role in the governance of socio-technical systems. However, the meanings, methods and purposes of anticipation in Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) policies have changed over time, moving in multiple directions. In the United Kingdom (UK) and the European Union (EU) a primary concern with the identification and management of technology risks during the 1990s, has in part been replaced by forms of anticipation that aim to be more participatory and inclusive, exploring the needs and expectations of societies, and addressing societal challenges such as pollution, poverty and climate change (Mazzucato 2018; Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2001; Owen, Von Schomberg, and Macnaghten 2021; Von Schomberg 2019).

Recent developments in Europe have seen the adoption of challenge-driven innovation policies, that seek to align innovation processes with grand societal or global challenges, including environmental challenges such as global warming or ecosystem degradation (Haddad et al. 2022; Mazzucato 2018). Examples of challenge-driven innovation approaches include the 2021–2027 Horizon Europe programme, the UK’s 2021 Innovation Strategy, and international frameworks such as the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Haddad et al. 2022). Challenge-led innovation is also promoted in industry settings, including in multi-national companies (Ludwig et al. 2022), international industry organizations (Mission Innovation 2021), and within specific industry sectors (Philp 2018).

A concern in the science and technology studies (STS) and science policy literature is that the shift towards challenge-driven innovation policies has not been accompanied by consistent support for responsible research and innovation (RRI) programs and policies (Gerber et al. 2020). This is reflected, for example, in the absence of financial and institutional support for RRI in Horizon Europe, and the lack of references to RRI in UK innovation strategy (Randles, Tancoigne, and Joly 2022). Some have argued that the increase in challenge-driven policies, combined with a decrease in attention to RRI, favours top-down innovation decisions, prioritizes solutions offered by dominant actors (Macnaghten, Shah, and Ludwig 2021), and supports technological ‘fixes’ over social, behavioural, or institutional responses (Pfotenhauer et al. 2022).

This article examines conceptions of challenge-driven innovation and the dynamics in relation to responsible innovation, in the UK’s industrial biotechnology (IB) sector. The UK has defined IB as a priority area (UK Government 2021; UKRI 2022), to reduce dependency on petrochemicals and transform the country to a sustainable, low carbon economy. This emphasis on industrial solutions to societal challenges and the fact that future IB will deploy controversial and potentially risky technologies such as genome editing and synthetic biology, make the UK’s IB sector to a relevant case study to explore the dynamics between RRI and challenge framings of industrial innovation.

Investigating this proposed shift to a ‘bio-based economy’ is one component of a longstanding programme of work we have been undertaking. The empirical materials discussed in this paper were collected as part of an iUK-funded project in which we conducted a sociological study of responsible innovation in IB. We conducted discourse analysis of IB policy reports and strategy documents, and examined archival records such as online documents, videos and IB company websites. We also conducted 30 interviews with IB stakeholders. These included industry practitioners, policy actors, personnel of UK funding bodies, NGOs, and researchers and managers of publicly funded IB networks.

Our research examined how IB policy discourse and IB stakeholders engaged with ideas of responsible innovation and with notions of societal challenges and social responsibility more broadly. Additionally, we investigated how IB policy documents and practitioners defined and employed different types of anticipation, as a way to identify, frame and address possible future opportunities and challenges. Within the scope of this inquiry, this paper seeks to answer the following questions: how do recent IB policy reports in the UK operationalize and use representations of grand societal challenges and responsible innovation? What forms of anticipation do these documents promote and prioritise? In which ways do representations in IB policy reports differ from the perceptions of key stakeholders?

The analyzed data presented in this paper include IB policy reports commissioned or co-commissioned by the UK’s Industrial Biotechnology Leadership Forum (IBLF). The IBLF was established by the UK government in 2010, and comprises stakeholders from industry, funding agencies, government and the research community. It provides a steering structure and coordination for the country’s IB sector, to shape priorities and provide policy recommendations for government and the wider IB community.¹ In 2018 and 2021, the IBLF commissioned two major policy reports that set out a strategic longer-term vision for the sector. These are the 2018 UK’s National Industrial Biotechnology Strategy to 2030 [the National Strategy], which has been co-developed with partners from industry, business, and government; and the 2021 report Industrial Biotechnology: Strategic Roadmap for Standards and Regulation [the Strategic Roadmap], which operationalizes aspects of the National Strategy further. We also draw on the 2013 report Sustainable Returns: Industrial Biotechnology Done Well, which sets out a strategy for responsible innovation in the IB sector. Our analysis of IB policy documents involved a comparative content analysis (Roessler 2013) that allowed us to understand how constructs of responsible and challenge-driven innovation changed in the last ten years, and to discern the specific motivations and purposes that underlie these shifting representations. The final part of the paper discusses findings from the analysis of our interviews with thirty IB stakeholders. Several of these participated in the shaping of the policy documents we analyzed, either as members of the IBLF, or as consultants and industry advisers. Others were involved in IB policy setting through their roles in UK funding bodies, functions in industry associations, or as members of the UK’s Synthetic Biology Leadership Council. Other respondents had to our knowledge no involvement in policy settings but served as researchers and managers in IB companies and universities. The interviews explored respondents’ perceptions of prospective social benefits of IB innovation processes and their views on conceivable risks and problematic societal, environmental, or other negative impacts. Because our analysis of IB policy documents was conducted after the interviews, we did not specifically examine stakeholder perceptions of mission or challenge-driven innovation as an emerging policy approach. However, we asked questions about the expected role of IB to tackle global challenges such as climate change, and the UK’s transition to a low carbon economy. The interview data were anonymized, transcribed and coded using NVIVO to identify themes and patterns that enabled us to understand how respondents operationalized notions of social responsibility, responsible innovation, and related issues and practices in the UK’s IB sector, at a personal, institutional and sectoral level. In a subsequent step, we identified common themes and differences that emerged from the side-by-side comparison of findings from the policy and interview analysis (Gale et al. 2013). As we will show, this analysis revealed notable disconnects between the forward-looking representations in IB policies, and the perspectives of industry and policy stakeholders. Although various respondents contributed to the development of the analyzed policy documents, in interviews many raised critical questions around hype, promises and the societal and environmental risks of upscaled IB production techniques.

The paper starts with a review of how challenge-driven innovation approaches, and their relation to responsible innovation, is discussed in the STS and science policy literature. This is followed by a reflection of the compatibility and tensions between RRI and challenge-driven innovation through the lens of ‘anticipation’. While techniques to forecast the future play a central role in both approaches, they promote different types of anticipation, that involve distinct, albeit sometimes overlapping, objectives, methods, stakeholders and types of knowledge. This is followed by a brief introduction to IB, its practices and potential applications. The article then examines how IB policy reports engage with notions of responsible and challenge-led innovation, and contrasts these with the views of the industry and policy experts. By engaging with work by Flyverbom and Garsten (2021) as well as Ludwig et al. (2022), we argue that the rhetorical alignment of industry innovation with major global challenges plays an important legitimatory role for the UK’s IB sector. The performative potential of mission and challenge-driven language helps industry actors to rearticulate their role and identity, pre-empt public criticism and to avoid a systematic engagement with the more problematic aspects of industrial and technology innovation. In the UK’s IB sector, the conflation of innovation objectives and grand societal challenges has facilitated a highly promissory environment, that has afforded new opportunities to construct representations of societal consensus and alignment, while avoiding the participatory practices on which shared understandings and a more nuanced exploration of societal expectations and values would normally be based.

Approaches to innovation policy: challenge and responsibility

Challenge-driven innovation policies aim to re-direct research and innovation processes to address grand societal and global challenge, and simultaneously to enable competitiveness and economic growth (Haddad et al. 2022). Mazuccato and other scholars that have shaped challenge-led policy frameworks in the EU and the UK (Mazzucato 2018) have defined grand challenges especially in terms of the UN’s 17 SDGs, which provide a comprehensive overview of contemporary global challenges (Penna, Schot, and Molas-Gallart 2021). This differs from more traditional innovation policies, for example in post-war Europe, that mainly prioritized economic growth, solutions to market failure, and the strengthening of national innovation systems. While these policies also sought to address specific missions (e.g. in the defence, nuclear or aerospace sector), a concern with societal and environmental challenges was mainly absent (Mazzucato 2018; Schot and Steinmueller 2018). In the EU this shift towards sustainable innovation goals is reflected in the 2021–2027 Horizon Europe framework, which has adopted a mission-oriented funding programme that seeks to accomplish ‘missions’ such as restoring oceans and waters and achieving climate-neutral and smart cities (European Commission 2021). The EU’s challenge-driven framework also extends to post-Brexit Britain, as UK research organizations continue to participate.² Challenge-led innovation approaches have also been adopted in national UK policies, such as the 2017 Industrial Strategy and the 2021 UK Innovation Strategy, which set out the government’s vision ‘to make the UK a global hub for innovation’, while also tackling ‘major challenges faced by the UK and the world’ (UK Government 2017). The Industrial Strategy defined four grand challenges as priorities, clean growth, ageing society, future of mobility, and artificial intelligence and data (UK Government 2017). Each challenge is addressed through ‘ambitious missions [that each] focus on a specific problem, bringing government, businesses and organisations across the country together to make a real difference to people’s lives’ (UK Government 2017).

Challenge-driven innovation has also been promoted by private sector organizations. For example, the international industry initiative ‘Mission Innovation’, with partners from 22 countries, aims to launch a ‘decade of clean energy innovation’ and is committed to ‘pioneer[ing] clean energy technologies and/or sectors’ while ‘considering[ing] domestic competitiveness and economic opportunities’ (Mission Innovation 2021). Mission and challenge-driven innovation ideas have also been adopted within specific industry sectors, such as the UK’s Industrial Biotechnology (IB) sector. Many of the policies and initiatives share commitments with the United Nations SDGs, or other international frameworks such as the Paris Climate Agreement, or the European Green Deal.

A key concern that has been raised, including in this journal, has been that the move toward challenge-led innovation policies has tracked a reduction in support for responsible research and innovation (RRI) programs and policies (Daimer et al. 2021; Gerber et al. 2020; Randles, Tancoigne, and Joly 2022). In the EU, where RRI played an important role in the 2014–2020 EU Horizon 2020 funding programme, RRI has ‘almost disappeared from the policy agenda’ (Daimer et al. 2021, 149). It is ‘no longer a cross-cutting issue in Horizon Europe, and the programme line of Science with and for Society (SwafS), which previously [supported] RRI, is not continued’ (Daimer et al. 2021). In the UK, although the AREA framework (Anticipate, Engage, Reflect and Act; adapted from: Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013) is still promoted by the main technical funding council (EPSRC), a commitment to RRI or other references to ‘responsible innovation’ are missing in the major national policy outputs (e.g. UK Innovation Strategy; 2022–2027 UKRI Strategy [UKRI 2022]).

The demise of RRI, in the context of an ascent in challenge and mission-driven innovation policies, has been critiqued in academic literature. Macnaghten, Shah, and Ludwig (2021), for example, have suggested that the choice and framing of grand societal challenges ‘tend to be chosen top-down by funding organisations, [and] in ways that often lend themselves to ‘silver bullet’ technological solutions’ (Macnaghten, Shah, and Ludwig 2021, 244). Although a central aim of RRI policies has been to align innovation processes with key societal and environmental issues, including grand challenges such as the SDGs (Von Schomberg 2019), the narrow, state-led approach to selecting sustainable innovation missions differs from the more participatory, bottom-up approach promoted by RRI. This is a potential downside of challenge-driven approaches. As Chataway et al. (2022) and others (e.g. Stirling and Arora 2022; Penna, Schot, and Molas-Gallart 2021) have pointed out, broad deliberation and open, participatory negotiation processes are essential for funding decisions around challenge-led innovation targets, especially at an upstream level where decisions about what types of research and innovation are funded are taken. Moreover, grand challenges such as the SDGs, as stressed by Ludwig et al. (2022), are ‘wicked problems’ that are ‘complex, open-ended and intractable, [with] contested problem formulations and responses’ (3). Not only do single, straightforward solutions to large-scale societal challenges not exist, but responses are also ‘contested’ due to differential impacts (Ludwig et al. 2022, 8). Responses to grand challenges using an RRI approach typically extend beyond technoscientific advances, and can also ‘include behavioural and cultural change, as well as social innovation’ (Haddad et al. 2022, 18). This complexity and the open-ended nature of grand challenges, highlights the need for broader decision-making, bringing together heterogenous perspectives and interests, to enable ‘transformational change beyond linear models of innovation and economic growth-focused innovation systems’ (Ludwig et al. 2022, 5). This would also encompass inter – and transdisciplinary research to explore the synergies between socio-economic, environmental, technological, and other factors that shape global challenges such as poverty, pollution or climate change (Chataway et al. 2022).

Whilst Horizon Europe and many other funding programmes promote practices of ‘co-creation’ with stakeholders, there have been concerns that due to increasing focus on industrial competitiveness (as reflected for example in one of the three pillars of Horizon Europe: ‘Global Challenges and European industrial competitiveness’), stakeholder engagement on new solutions to global challenges will preference industry interests and undervalue other perspectives and actors (Ludwig et al. 2022; Robinson, Simone, and Mazzonetto 2021). As Tuckerman et al. (2023) state in their analysis of the UK’s Innovation Strategy, sustainable innovation targets are mainly portrayed ‘as a business opportunity, rather than a true engagement with complex environmental [and societal] problems’ (2023, 292), and references to partnerships and collaborations mainly prioritize relationships between the business, university, and public sector, rather than consultation and co-creation with diverse societal stakeholders (2023, 293).

RRI, as Voegtlin et al. (2022) have noted, offers vital synergies to address some of the limitations of challenge-driven innovation approaches. RRI’s focus on upstream engagement and input from a wide variety of actors and domains strengthens participatory and reflexive processes in the development and implementation of challenge-oriented innovation policies, including in businesses and the private sector. RRI, these authors argue, creates possibilities for more inclusive agenda setting, community-led research, as well as feedback and adaption to respond to the complexities and uncertainties of research and development activities for grand societal challenges. ‘Anticipation’, as a central element of all innovation processes, enables us to explore this dynamic further and in the next section we highlight the compatibility and tensions between RRI and challenge-driven innovation approaches through this lens.

Anticipation and its consequences

Anticipatory practices inspire action in the here and now, based on expectations about the future (Konrad et al. 2016). The scenarios that anticipatory practices create can offer both positive, promissory aspects of technoscientific developments, and potentially negative or problematic effects (Adams, Murphy, and Clarke 2009). Projections that generate positive expectations and promises about the future are often used to legitimize and guide innovation processes and to mobilize funding, political support and public trust (Konrad et al. 2016). Projections of possible challenges, risks or negative effects, in turn, allow tactical interventions to ameliorate these problematic futures, and to manage public opposition and mistrust (Alvial-Palavicino 2016).

RRI and challenge-driven innovation policies each involve and promote different types of anticipation that encompass differing (albeit in some respects overlapping) objectives, methods, stakeholders and types of knowledge. In challenge-driven innovation approaches, anticipation entails three main aspects: the identification and characterization of major societal and environmental challenges that are likely to increase in the future; the envisioning of alternative, more desirable future scenarios (in which identified challenges, or their problematic effects are addressed, reduced, or averted; e.g. clean oceans, food security, etc.), which are then framed as targeted outcomes, goals or missions; and third, the conception of actionable responses and means to achieve these aspirations. In policies such as the UK’s 2017 Industrial Strategy, the selection of challenges and definition of corresponding missions, is defined at the governmental level, with input from selected academics, funding bodies, and representatives of industry (UK Government 2021). Bottom-up approaches, that include engagement with stakeholders and publics, trans-disciplinary collaboration and public-private partnerships, are expected only at a later stage of the innovation cycle, to identify and develop new approaches, and to adjust possible responses to the needs and conditions of specific contexts (Haddad et al. 2022).

This approach differs significantly from RRI which aims to enable more open, inclusive forms of decision-making not only at the downstream level but upstream, as part of the development of agenda definitions, policy and funding programs (Deserti, Rizzo, and Smallman 2020). Anticipation in RRI aims both, to align innovation objectives with societal challenges, values and needs, and the forecasting of the broader societal, economic, and environmental transformations and effects of new inventions and technologies. For both of these purpose, RRI encourages interdisciplinary and participatory approaches, that generate multiple and diverse perspectives (Von Schomberg 2019; Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013). Societal alignment in RRI is not restricted to a small number of pre-selected challenges and missions (grand or otherwise). Instead, participatory deliberation in RRI has aimed to connect innovation processes to a wide range of societal challenges, depending on the priorities, needs and concerns that stakeholders, citizens and communities define as relevant (Ribeiro et al. 2018). While this can include a concern with grand challenges, the directionality of innovation processes in RRI is deliberately left more open. This means, that contributions to a wider range of societal issues can be anticipated and targeted, with less gatekeeping and reduced need to achieve already-defined missions.

RRI has also consistently emphasized the need to anticipate the potentially problematic impacts of innovation processes on societies, economies and the environment, including the exploration of side effects and unintended consequences, as well as risks arising from potential malpractice, misuse, dual use, or premature, or insufficiently regulated, technology applications (Randles, Tancoigne, and Joly 2022). While some of these matters are addressed through government regulations (such as the EU Dual Use Regulation, or the EU Regulatory Framework on Genetically Modified Organisms [GMOs]), a key intention of RRI has been to address broader and longer-term societal questions and impacts, beyond the narrow scope of legal and regulatory compliance (Ulnicane, Mahfoud, and Salles 2022). In contrast to older, and more conventional forms of risk assessment, that have focused on technological risks and the impact of new technologies on human health and the environment, anticipation in RRI also addresses less tangible societal issues, such as issues related to distributive justice, solidarity, identity and personhood, or the impact of technologies on social systems and modes of production. Unlike in traditional risk assessment, anticipatory practice in RRI does not strive to predict and control, but aims to create multiple scenarios of technology development by expanding societal imaginations through trans-disciplinary collaboration, stakeholder deliberation and engagement with various publics (Guston 2014; Owen, Von Schomberg, and Macnaghten 2021). While the types and methods of anticipation differ between RRI and challenge-driven approaches, in both cases the deployment of anticipatory practices and knowledge is linked to questions of power and performativity.

Power/knowledge and the performative aspects of anticipation

The types of phenomena, problems or expected benefits that become visible, knowable and possible to act on through anticipatory practices, are shaped by power dynamics and conflicting interests, as well as differences in values and established ways of thinking (Flyverbom and Garsten 2021). These factors point to the situated and politicized nature of anticipatory knowledge, in innovation governance and beyond. They also demonstrate that representations of the future are contested and characterized by limitations and blind spots, deliberate or otherwise.

Representations of the future and the expectations they create also have a performative dimension (Alvial-Palavicino 2016). As Flyverbom and Garsten have documented, firms and other organizations may use anticipatory practices as a ‘performative organizing force’ that helps them to strategically shape their surroundings and to achieve pre-mediated goals (2021, 19). Different types of anticipation, these authors argue, and the varied knowledges and expectations they produce, can serve as ‘templates for organizational action’ (Flyverbom and Garsten 2021, 2). These templates create narratives of the future that enable, guide and legitimize specific actions and interventions. An example of such a template is ‘anticipation via projected transformations’ (Flyverbom and Garsten 2021, 13). The anticipatory construction of a ‘projected transformation’, they suggest, depicts the future as something that can be designed and changed, typically in relation to specific challenges or needs, for example climate change and related requirements such as continued agricultural production and food security (Flyverbom and Garsten 2021, 13). Representations of projected transformations can depict ‘the future as if it were already out there in some tangible form’ (e.g. as if climate resilient agricultural systems would already exist), and as something that is achievable and can be ‘designed and realized in the long term’ (Flyverbom and Garsten 2021, 14). These projected possibilities to transform the future and resolve problematic situations, highlight the performative role of such representations for firms, governments and other organizations. The promissory potential of these projections makes them performative by their very nature and provide industrial actors and sectors such as IB with possibilities to influence and structure the activities and expectations of research, innovation and policy actors, including publics and civil society. We now introduce IB, its practices and potential applications, before presenting the empirical analysis.

Industrial biotechnology

IB can be understood simply as the use of microbes and fermentation processes to produce consumer products, and arguably biotechnology has a long history. Some will point to ancient cultures and their production of wine and beer, for example. Biotech approaches in the twentieth century led to the mass production of enzymes with a multitude of uses (e.g. detergents). The industry now produces chemicals, animal feeds, and plastics, as well as agricultural and pharmaceutical products. However, the conventional production systems for chemicals and materials are heavily reliant on the use of petroleum-derived feedstocks, such as the acryls used to produce paint, Perspex etc. More recently, use of synthetic biology approaches in IB have been advocated to reduce and eventually remove a reliance on the petro-chemical means of production (Clarke and Kitney 2020). Interest in the synthetic biology field has grown substantially since the advent of specific funding programmes, teaching activity and dedicated conferences (Balmer, Bulpin, and Molyneux-Hodgson 2016; Molyneux-Hodgson and Meyer 2009). As a promissory science (Brown and Michael 2003) synthetic biology has been claimed as relevant to many potential applications (food, fuel, medicine) and what constitutes this approach can be described in multiple ways (Kastenhofer and Molyneux-Hodgson 2021). Synthetic biology approaches in IB would allow for the engineering of the genome of selected microbes, to transform these into ‘cellular factories’, which (if successfully applied) would secrete chemical compounds that can be isolated for industrial use (Erickson, Nelson, and Winters 2012). These processes may in the future include commodity and speciality chemicals that are used for the production of a wide range of consumer goods, such as household products (e.g. laundry and dishwashing detergents), personal care products (shampoos, cremes, toothpaste), fragrances and aromatics (e.g. artificial vanilla, sweeteners), de-icing and antifreeze products, (‘bio’)plastics, (‘bio’)fuels, and many others (Philp, Ritchie, and Allan 2013). While the production pathway of these chemicals is different (biological versus petro-chemical), the compounds produced are imagined as direct replacements for those derived from conventional production. The regulatory regimes would differ however, with the synthetic biology approaches requiring governance arrangement that account for the use of GMOs.

Anticipation in writing: the UK national IB strategy

UK policy reports and strategy documents on the IB-based production of chemicals make highly promissory claims about the future of this sector. In 2018 the IB Leadership Forum (IBLF) published the report: ‘Growing the UK Industrial Biotechnology Base – A National Strategy to 2030’. Developed by representatives from business, industry, funders, academia and the government, the strategy sets out a vision and roadmap for the IB sector, stating:

Industrial Biotechnology offers huge potential for the UK, providing jobs and economic growth across a wide range of market and industry sectors. IB can mitigate climate change through the development of greener, cleaner manufacturing processes, as well as offering opportunities for waste utilisation and new products that benefit society which cannot be made any other way. (IBLF 2018)

Co-promoted by the UK Bioindustry Association (BIA) the document positions IB innovation in the UK as a cornerstone for the establishment of a ‘sustainable, circular bioeconomy’, and aims to position the country as a ‘world leader in IB’ (IBLF 2018, 6). But in what ways does the National Strategy consider (or recommend looking at) the full range of impacts? Does it only focus on expected benefits, or does it consider potentially negative consequences or unintended adverse effects, and which anticipatory practices to identify these are used or promoted? A mixed picture emerges. While the National Strategy is committed to public outreach activities that aim to make IB innovation more transparent, it does not initiate a more open innovation process, one that would allow for input from societal actors and wider public. References to technological risk or problematic or inadvertent effects of IB on society, the environment or the economy are lacking; nor is there any recommendation in the Strategy to explore these.

Anticipatory projections in the National Strategy focus exclusively on the promissory aspects of IB innovation. For instance, the Strategy claims that the UK IB sector will be able to ‘address major societal challenges’ and have the potential to address ‘at least six’ of the UN’s SDGs: responsible consumption and production; climate action; affordable and clean energy; the creation of sustainable infrastructures and industrialization; decent work and economic growth; and sustainable cities and consumption (IBLF 2018, 6). Like many position statements on new technology, the promissory rhetoric renders invisible the wider contexts and consequences of the techno-scientific development.

While some will consider this situation unsurprising, this one-sided concern with future benefits contrasts with previous IB policy reports in the UK. For example, the 2013 report Sustainable Returns: Industrial Biotechnology Done Well (Porritt 2013), also commissioned by the IBLF, made a strong case for the adoption of responsible innovation ideas and the adoption of anticipatory methods to reflect on, identify and prevent potential adverse developments for societies and the environment. This report introduced ‘mandates’ that reflected key ideas in the anticipatory governance and RRI agendas. These included, among others: (i) the creation of regulatory and governance structures that put public interest and private gain on equal footing, (ii) the promotion of extensive stakeholder engagement, (iii) no threat to human health; (iv) to assure the safety of communities surrounding production facilities; (v) a commitment to production systems that optimize conditions for biodiversity and healthy ecosystems; (vi) avoidance of gene transfer in the open environment, and (vii) anticipation and prevention of adverse impacts on food security and the environment (Porritt 2013, 40).

One of our research participants (I-11), a member of the UK Synthetic Biology Leadership Council, reported that the impact of the Sustainable Returns report had been limited. They claimed that the IBLF commissioned the report primarily to signal to the public a commitment to the responsible use of synthetic biology and GMOs, in order to reduce concerns and minimize criticism. Indeed, none of the more recent IB policy reports mentions the recommendations laid out in the 2013 report. Six years on from the desire for ‘IB done well’, the language of responsible innovation and a commitment to the systematic anticipation of potential adverse effects had virtually disappeared. The 2018 IB National Strategy, for example, completely ignored debates on potentially problematic implications of IB innovation processes. There is no mention of public engagement, open dialogue, risk assessment, anticipation of unintended effects, or any of the mandates introduced in the industry-supported 2013 report. The term ‘responsible research and innovation’ is mentioned once, in the final section of the report titled ‘Communication’, which sets out a plan to ‘target the masses’ through ‘public advertisements’, ‘new media resources’ and ‘public outreach’ (IBLF 2018, 44; cf., anon).

The reducing of RRI to outreach and (top down, uni-directional) communication, to persuade civil society and the general public, harks to earlier times in the innovation arena. It circumvents a more open, inclusive approach to deliberation and decision making in the IB sector, that integrates perspectives of diverse societal stakeholders. It also sidesteps a systematic and participatory evaluation of the broader societal implications of IB innovation, including of possible adverse effects on the environment, human health, or the economy. These are key elements of both RRI and anticipatory governance approaches. On the other hand, the National Strategy’s emphasis on the sector’s proclaimed potential to ‘address major societal challenges’ and the above-mentioned six SDGs, echoes the language of challenge and mission-oriented policy discourse.

In the context of the broader economic ambitions of the National IB Strategy, and its aim to put the UK at the forefront of the IB sector globally, there is also reason for scepticism. There is little substantiation of a coherent strategy through which the grand societal challenges and sustainability goals that the report mentions shall be addressed. Evidence that IB technologies can achieve the proposed targets is not provided. With its long-term vision to ‘drive growth and innovation’, ‘work with policy makers to promote IB’, and to create a ‘consistent longer-term policy landscape’ and ‘financial environment’ that ‘supports industrial biotech and the bioeconomy’ (IBLF 2018, 42), the National IB Strategy appears primarily a conventional instrument of industrial development.

The 2021 IB strategic roadmap

The 2021 Industrial Biotechnology Strategic Roadmap for Standards and Regulation, produced by the British Standards Institution (BSI) and co-commissioned by the IBLF and Innovate UK, developed aspects of the 2018 National IB Strategy further. As in the National Strategy, the 2021 Roadmap positions IB as offering key solutions to address the ‘wide range of social, environmental, and economic needs defined by the UN Sustainable Development Goals’ (BSI 2021, 5). However, in contrast to the National Strategy, which mentioned (possible) contributions to six SDGs, the 2021 report claims that UK IB can help advance twelve out of seventeen SDGs (BSI 2021, 5). According to the Strategic Roadmap, IB has the potential to ‘address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate, environmental degradation, prosperity, and peace and justice’ (BSI 2021, 5). IB innovation is also portrayed as a central enabler for the UK government’s legislated target of achieving net zero greenhouse emissions by 2050.

These claims notwithstanding, the Roadmap acknowledges that due to the ‘early maturity stage [of the sector] empirical evidence frameworks [and] impact measurements’ that could ‘offer a quantified, sequenced prediction of the overall CO2 reduction’ and other advantages of IB, are mostly absent, because ‘comprehensive data [are] simply not available at this point’ (BSI 2021, 4). While the Roadmap states that the generation of such data is an urgent priority for the future (BSI 2021, 4), in the absence of such evidence the recurring emphasis on SDGs, global challenges, climate change, and the UK’s net zero policy, plays mainly a rhetorical role. This is reflected in the report’s approach to promoting expectations and anticipating benefits of the industry, that are further discussed below.

Tactical communication: global goals as basis for a unifying IB identity

According to the 2021 Strategic Roadmap, a ‘headline challenge of IB is to sharpen a compelling overall identity [to] be supported by a unifying purpose and meaning that is accessible to those outside the immediate [IB] community’ (BSI 2021, 30). Referring back to the 2018 National Strategy, the Roadmap recommends in this regard to, ‘formulate a communication strategy to raise the public profile of IB and enlist advocacy and funding, with targeted messaging by audience type’ (BSI 2021, 32). A central aim of such messaging is to address public concerns around synthetic biology, gene editing and the use of GMOs:

Specific messaging will [need] to be developed on the subject of gene editing, and more generally GM, [to] provide the public with clarification, understanding and evidence that addresses consumer concern, [and] as a counterweight to misperceptions shaped by historical media coverage. (BSI 2021, 32)

Contents that shall be transmitted include, for example, that IB enables ‘superior environmental impacts’ (BSI 2021, 39), provides ‘answers to society’s biggest challenges’ (BSI 2021, 33), and is able to lead ‘the frontline of net zero, decarbonization and sustainability’ (BSI 2021, 33). These communications, the Roadmap concludes, will help the public understand that ‘rather than being a focal point for concern, gene editing [and synthetic biology] might better be seen as a solution to many of the world’s problems’ (BSI 2021, 35).

As with the National Strategy, the 2021 Strategic Roadmap promotes a one-directional, top-down communication model, that emphasizes outreach and education, rather than a dialogic approach of communication, deliberation, and mutual learning. While the Roadmap states that IB innovation objectives must ‘align with the needs and expectations of stakeholders from investors to consumers’ (BSI 2021, 30), this intention is mentioned together with sector-specific interests, such as the ‘garnering of trust’ (BSI 2021, 30), and ‘creating consumer pull and the confidence that investors are seeking’ (BSI 2021, 30). Moreover, in the absence of (plans for) more inclusive forms of public engagement and participatory decision-making, conceptions of public ‘needs and expectations’ are mainly derived top down, by using the global SDGs and the UK’s Net Zero policy as externally defined normative anchor points. This avoids a more open, broad deliberation of the views and requirements of societal stakeholders, including the needs of diverse social groups, and the integration of these insights into innovation design and implementation, as RRI has recommended (e.g. Owen, Von Schomberg, and Macnaghten 2021).

Failure to address potentially problematic impacts

Another parallel with the National Strategy is that the 2021 Roadmap does neither mention nor address possible negative effects, risks or inadvertent consequences of IB innovation and its future applications. An engagement with potential technology risks, biosafety issues, the likelihood of biological hazards, or other inadvertent consequences, including disruption of employment structures or other societal and economic consequences, is not included in the report. This is surprising. The BSI, which co-produced the 2021 Roadmap, published in March 2020 a Responsible Innovation standard (PAS 440:2020), which is the first corporate governance guide for responsible innovation of its kind (BSI 2020). This standard was created so that firms and industry stakeholders can ‘consider not only the benefits of their innovations’, but also to anticipate ‘any possible adverse impacts, including through unintended use, misuse, or other unforeseen consequences and to plan accordingly’ (BSI 2020b). The use of PAS 440:2020 is recommended ‘when significantly new types of innovation are being undertaken’ (BSI 2022a, iv) and biotechnology is mentioned as one of several ‘market areas’, for which the standard can ‘help [to] manage the process of responsible innovation across all innovation stages up to and beyond market launch’ (BSI 2022a, iv).

Environmental standards as ‘lever for IB momentum’

The absence of PAS 440:2020, or any other reference to RRI, anticipation of potential future challenges, risk mitigation or biosafety governance, in the Strategic Roadmap is surprising because the use and ‘development of standards and regulation as an enabling framework for UK Industrial Biotechnology’ (BSI 2021, 1) is a central aim of the document. A closer look reveals that the primary focus in the Roadmap is on environmental standards, which are portrayed as an essential ‘lever for IB momentum’ (BSI 2021, 1). The reason for this is as follows: standards such as PAS 2060 (Net Zero Carbon certification standard), ISO 14040 (Environmental Management certification standard) and ISO 14044 (Life Cycle Assessment [LCA] certification standard) play an important role for companies in measuring and communicating environmental benefits of new technologies, such as carbon neutrality claims (BSI 2021, 40). As the Roadmap clarifies, these standards and corresponding certificates and declarations, can be used to demonstrate environmental advantages of IB applications to consumers and other stakeholders; for example, via product labels, company websites and other channels (BSI 2021, 40). By completing PAS 2060, for example, companies can ‘publicly declare that their product has attained the status of carbon neutrality’ (BSI 2021, 40).

According to the 2021 Roadmap, the strategic application of select environmental standards, ‘for a cross-section of IB-derived products and materials […] would provide a powerful platform from which to promote a broad message of environmental superiority over [existing petrochemical and other] legacy technologies [and products] that is backed by scientific data and by a consolidated body of evidence’ (BSI 2021, 40). LCA certification and other environmental standards can:

Demonstrate clear and compelling environmental advantages [of IB products] over many of the products and materials against which they compete, particularly fossil-derived fuels, chemicals and plastics. Effective communication of these advantages to both consumers and B2B customers will therefore be key to accelerated market adoption. (BSI 2021, 38)

This excerpt illustrates that the 2021 Roadmap promotes the strategic use of environmental standards to create evidence of the ‘green potential’ of IB technologies, compared to other production processes and products. These data can then be used to substantiate claims that IB contributes to grand societal challenges, the SDGs and the UK’s Net Zero strategy, and be deployed as ‘persuasive device’ to influence public acceptance and accelerate commercial use.

Perspectives from industry and policy stakeholders

The primary focus on the benefits of IB illustrated by the 2018 National IB Strategy and the 2021 Strategic Roadmap not only represented a shift from earlier IB reports, but also stands in sharp contrast with the perspectives articulated by IB stakeholders. Our interview data illustrate notable disconnects between policy representations and the views of interviewed IB actors. The following paragraphs provide a startling counter-narrative to the promissory framings in IB policy documents. A disconnect between policy discourse and stakeholder views is more commonly associated with antagonists of IB developments (e.g. Asveld et al. 2019). Yet, as we show below, stakeholders supportive of IB have raised questions around hype, promises and risks of the technology. They have expressed a more cautious assessment of the sector’s potential to achieve the claims laid out in IB policy discourse and thereby demonstrate alternate forms of anticipation to those found in the documents (in some cases, documents that respondents helped to craft). Most of the respondents we interviewed acknowledged the need for comprehensive, long-term anticipation of possible risks and unintended societal, economic and environmental impacts; an aspect that the National IB Strategy and Roadmap completely ignore. We will reflect on the possible causes that underlie these disconnects in the conclusion.

Criticizing the hype, acknowledging the downsides

Several research participants stressed that, in their view, public representations of the benefits of IB were mostly overhyped and that there was little evidence to support many of the claims. One participant (I-18), a manager at an IB company who was actively involved in the development of the 2018 National Strategy, stated:

One of the greatest risks that IB currently presents, is simply the overpromise of the technology. […] We may have made claims around things like sustainability, but have we actually tested these? Do we have data to support the claims that we make, what are we comparing that against?

According to them, and other participants, many of the promises on how IB will benefit the environment and the economy were exaggerated and not supported by data.

We have to be very careful that we are not sustaining overconsumption by promising that, don’t worry, eventually we will save the world. (I-18)

For me, the problem with GMOs is, every technology does the same thing, to overhype. Everyone goes, ah, you know, [achieve the] end to hunger, nanotechnology is going to cure cancer … similarly with synthetic biology, redesigning nature, all this bollocks. No wonder people get nervous, when you overhype what you’re going to deliver. (I-11)

Several respondents claimed that pronouncements such as the National UK Strategy ignore potential adverse effects of IB innovation, and that there is a systematic lack of an honest assessment, with potentially problematic societal and environmental impacts following.

I think it’s absolutely true that if we are serious about responsible innovation we should describe and analyse impacts … we need to do that in a much more honest and intelligent manner than we tend to do at the moment. And we should be free to do that, so there needs to be a culture that allows people to honestly assess those risks. (I-18)

I-25, a senior synthetic biology researcher in academia, noted that like industrial transformations of the past, IB innovation would create new challenges, including potentially disruptive impacts for human societies and unintended effects on ecosystems:

The early entrepreneurs of the industrial revolution contaminated all sorts of land, and the atmosphere and the sea, but they didn’t know. [… .] Industrial biotechnology and synthetic biology is going to be no different to that.

This awareness of impacts within the IB community sits alongside a widely-held view that anticipating the nature and scale of consequences is not straightforward.

We will learn more as time goes by. But to anticipate 40, 100 years time, it’s very difficult. (I-25)

Many of our respondents had an articulate awareness of the broader impacts and possible negative effects and risks of industrial biotech innovation. We present the most important of these concerns below. Although none of these are mentioned as issues in the National IB Strategy or the Strategic Roadmap, this level of awareness is in some senses unsurprising. Controversy regarding the pros and cons of innovation in the biotech sector is longstanding and some of our participants were particularly well read in the literature in this area. The food-versus-fuel debate, for example, dates back over a decade and many people we came across in the biotech sector recall the oft-termed ‘GM foods debacle’ (Levidow and Carr 2009). Avoidance of a repeat of ‘debacles’ is a driving concern among current industrial biotech protagonists (Asveld et al. 2019). These anxieties about a public backlash may be one reason why the National Strategy avoided alluding to possible negative or unintended consequences. But we should note that the deployment of RRI approaches is intended to address such concerns directly and therefore the absence of RRI in the recent IB policies would appear self-defeating.

The economic and social side effects of sectoral restructuring

Commenting on the broader societal impact of IB innovations over the next two or three decades, I-16, a chief scientific officer of a large UK biotech company, stated:

Industrial biotech, especially using synthetic biology, if it delivers on what it promises from a technical perspective, I think some of the challenges will be social challenges. Just as we saw in the 1980s [in] the North East of England when shipbuilding and steelmaking and mining all stopped. It takes a long time to recover from that. Here we are 30 years later, the area’s still a more deprived area […]. And I think synthetic biology offers to do the same again really. If we’re testing [synthetic biology to make] things which currently are made from natural products […] that is a pretty big change, especially for some of the large commodity chemicals which are made from oil or oil derivatives at the moment. […] That’s a pretty big change. And I think actually if this becomes reality then it’s just as big a change as stopping mining coal or building ships or making steel.

What I-16 is describing are the effects of a gradual replacement of the conventional chemical and petrochemical industry with a microbial-based approach to chemicals production, a substitution expected to happen once the GMO-based manufacturing of chemicals enters large-scale production. These technical changes can create new patterns of inclusion and exclusion and prioritize some regions (and countries) above others, which can lead to unemployment and social disintegration. Similar concerns were raised by other participants. I-5, a project leader in an IB company, stated for example:

In some circumstances, you might say, yes, it’s a good thing. If we’re disrupting petrochemical production maybe society and everybody would say that is a good thing, because it’s a greener alternative. But, if you’re disrupting other processes, which are maybe not so clear-cut … [it’s difficult to say] if this the right thing to do morally.

Displacement of farming systems, economic impacts in developing countries

Another issue that respondents raised was the impact of the use of GMOs in the production of chemical compounds such as synthetic vanilla, menthol, orange blossom or other flavours, on existing cash-crop production systems and the livelihoods of farmers and their families and communities:

Think about vanilla. Farmers in developing world countries produce vanilla and it's […] an important income, like tea and coffee, many cash crops. We can make vanilla using genetically modified microbes. [It is] probably cheaper, but we have large groups of farmers in developing countries losing their jobs. So, was the research that went into that biotechnology-produced vanilla responsible? (I-28, bioproducts specialist consultant)

I-4, the section head of a UK scientific funding body, stated that an assessment of the deeper socioeconomic effects of IB is crucial, but rarely happening in practice:

Vanilla [grows] largely in Madagascar. [What happens] if you replace that crop with synthetic vanilla flavouring? What’s the impact, what does that do to the developing world? […] We don’t ever really go into the deep aspects of the economics, the socioeconomics of it. We do have to think about this. […] Could this have an unanticipated impact which would, actually, be detrimental to other societies?

Evolva, the first company that produced synthetic biology-based vanillin (the chemical compound of vanilla), firmly defended its innovation as a sustainable alternative to already existing artificial vanillin, but critics claimed that GMO-based production methods would further reduce traditional vanilla production and affect the livelihood of vanilla famers (McEachran 2015). According to Ribeiro and Shapira (2019), the assessment of the market impacts of new target compounds for synthetic biology, and their societal effects, including on the lives of farmers as well as local and global agricultural systems, requires nuanced case-by-case analyses. Such evaluations necessitate a detailed understanding of the ways in which markets and production systems are connected between countries (2019, 316). Considering that there are a growing number of scents and flavours that are targets in the IB sector for bio-based production in the future, farmers in various agricultural sub-sectors around the world are likely to suffer disadvantages.

Environmental adverse effects and (lack of) regulatory oversight

The extent and conditions under which IB production of chemicals could negatively affect the environment was a heated topic of debate in all of our interviews. Most respondents thought that, overall, the dangers were less, or fewer, compared to petrochemical manufacturing. I-25 summarized this as follows:

Generally, a biological process will be operating in an aqueous medium, which is basically innocuous, or at least not toxic, because it supports life. […] Production of the chemicals [takes place] at low pressures and so there’s not the same kind of risks that would be involved in a (petro-)chemical plant, which might be operating at very high temperatures, high pressures, explosions, you know, etcetera.

While bio-based approaches were seen as inherently ‘safer’ in terms of the constituents and industrial processing elements, the notion of ‘escape’ remained prevalent. Unintended environmental release of genetically modified microbes and adverse effects on other organisms and ecosystems was a frequent, recurrent theme in the interviews. The main concern here, as I-5, a project leader in an IB company put it, is that ‘GMO bugs […] might outcompete the natural bugs in the environment’. Another concern was horizontal gene transfer (HGT), where modified genes (and corresponding biological functions) are passed on to other organisms, with unknown consequences. As I-25 pointed out, risks for HGT are especially pronounced if synthetic biology ‘becomes truly synthetic, and we’re generating new functions, and new biological functions […] which could then be passed on, if there was a leak’. Most participants claimed, however, that in the current situation in the UK, the risks of environmental release and HGT were small for two reasons: first, well-established regulatory infrastructure and containment protocols, and second, the production of bio-based chemicals had not yet reached industrial scale.

Many respondents expected that risks for environmental adverse effects would increase once production scaled up and manufacturing took place across the globe. A particular concern was variability in regulatory regimes and inconsistent adherence to safe practices:

At a global level, that’s a more difficult thing, very difficult, because once the use of GMOs goes […] into an environment where it becomes all about exploitation then it’s a different world altogether. (I-12, head of a mid-size biotech company)

Interviewer: So, things could go wrong … 

Not could, will. We know that, we’ve seen it happen in other areas. […] Once you start the exploitation path and want to bring things maybe to the people who need it most [in developing countries], then the risks get greater and greater and you need to be aware of that. (I-12)

Similar concerns were shared by others. I-19, a technical researcher, stated that in poorly regulated countries, ‘maybe they don’t understand the issues about containment and suddenly it [recombinant organisms] is all being washed into the rivers, and it’s got out of control because there’s no understanding or no enforcement on protection’. Another respondent stated that:

The environment […] is at risk, because of these biological processes. These organisms are modified and not natural. Containment becomes important. […] You would hope that the regulatory aspects of all of the projects [that] we’re funding, … that the safety mechanisms are in place. But there is always going to be a risk. (P14, unit manager in a UK funding body).

These statements point to risks in the industrial use of GMOs at a global level, especially in potentially less well-regulated countries than in the EU and UK. Considering that many biotech players are international concerns these challenges are significant, including for researchers and companies in the UK. Stronger self-governance, in addition to improved international rules, is a choice that many companies will have to make. Moreover, since bacteria and other micro-organisms are not known to respect geographical borders, adverse effects that start in one part of the world could, of course, affect other parts.

Discussion

The preceding sections have discussed how recent IB policy reports in the UK have operationalized and used representations of grand societal challenges and responsible innovation, and what forms of anticipation these documents prioritize. The article then explored how policy representations differ from the views of stakeholders. Our analysis shows that the adoption of challenge-driven innovation language has enabled highly strategic representations of the sector’s anticipated contributions to grand societal and environmental problems in the UK and globally. The proclaimed potential of IB to tackle these challenges, and to contribute to the SDGs and the UK’s Net-Zero policy, were portrayed as central to the re-shaping of the sector’s public image and identity, and as a basis for targeted messaging to reduce public concerns about GMOs and synthetic biology. Notions of responsible innovation, on the other hand, that were deployed in previous IB policy documents (such as the 2013 report ‘IB Done Well’), that stressed the role of broad stakeholder engagement, and the need to address key safety issues in the sector, such as risks to human health, biodiversity, and communities surrounding IB production facilities, and other potentially negative effects of IB innovation processes were no longer prioritized.

These representations contrast with the reflexive and at times self-critical views of interviewed IB stakeholders, which provided a startling counter-narrative to the promissory framings in the 2018 National IB Strategy and the 2021 IB Roadmap. Many respondents were critical of the unverified claims in these documents and recognized the uncertain and non-linear nature of innovation processes. They expressed a vital awareness of the absence of evidence on which representations to solve global goals and other challenges were based, and of the possible adverse effects, risks and other potentially problematic implications of IB, beyond the promissory narratives of the policy arena. Most interviewees acknowledged the significance of anticipatory practices that implement a broad, holistic appraisal of innovation impacts, including potentially problematic and unintended effects. As many of the interviews testified, concerns about safety and environmental risks of the industrial use of genetically modified microbes, and other disruptive effects of the shift towards a bio-based economy, remain as relevant today as ten years ago, when these issues were still publicly acknowledged. Recent IB policy documents, as shown, have adopted a different style of anticipation, one that focuses exclusively on beneficial future impacts, and ignores a concern with possible negative implications.

The contradictions inherent between policy discourse and stakeholder perspectives are intriguing, especially when we consider that some participants have been involved in both production of policy and our interview study. While this requires additional investigation, beyond the scope of this paper, we propose four conjectures that could help to explain the disconnects between policy representations and stakeholder views, and which could inform further research. A first conjecture is that with the decreasing significance of RRI in the EU and UK policy landscape, a commitment to anticipate potentially problematic societal impacts of technology innovation, may become less important. Although interviewed stakeholders acknowledged the relevance of these matters, in the absence of formal policy requirements to explore the broader and longer-term societal, economic and environmental impacts of emerging technologies, including those that may otherwise remain little discussed or uncovered, the scrutiny of these issues is not given attention. This raises the question whether the declining relevance of RRI is a regression to earlier risk assessment approaches, to which RRI was a response to (Owen, Van Schomberg, Macnaghten 2021), that mainly prioritized technical risks in the evaluation of emerging technologies, in a much narrower sense.

In the UK’s IB sector, however, the move towards less public consideration of potential negative impacts, could also be driven by a change in public opinion on the use of synthetic biology and genetically modified organisms. This is reflected, for example, by the Genetic Technology Bill that was introduced to the House of Commons in May 2023, which would relax UK rules regarding the use of GMOs (UK Government 2023). Public views of gene editing and GMOs in the UK appear generally to have been softened (Devlin 2022). Various studies have shown that fears of a public backlash have been a main driving force behind efforts to engage with potential downsides of technological developments (cf. Marris 2015). With public opposition on GMOs subsiding, the urgency to focus on societal concerns could have diminished.

A third conjecture relates to the impact of post-Brexit anxieties about decreasing economic growth, less funding, and global competitiveness, which can be hurtful for emerging industrial sectors such as IB. To stay competitive, secure sufficient investment, and enable the survival of IB firms and the sector as a whole, the National IB Strategy and Roadmap may have utilized an excessively promising rhetoric, strategically amplifying likely contributions to global challenges, coupled with pledges to revitalize the UK economy, whilst reducing a concern with potential societal or environmental ramifications, which might be perceived as a threat to the sector’s public image and development.

A final conjecture concerns the contradictions between policy representations and the views of interviewed stakeholders. Respondents that helped shape these policy documents may, in the context of their professional roles, have felt compelled to support these optimistic projections, while having reservations about their accuracy on a personal level. Claims in the National Strategy of the UK’s IB sector as a future world leader align with a larger narrative of the UK’s global science leadership, that is frequently expressed in the political arena. Expectations to align with government priorities, as well as pressure to satisfy the demands of investors, shareholders, superiors and a potentially critical public, may have led to overly rosy forecasts, despite doubts on the precision of these claims on a personal basis. Unfortunately, while many of the interviewed policy makers and scientists had a nuanced understanding of potential adverse impacts of IB and synthetic biology, including biosafety and biosecurity concerns, none of these issues were reflected in the reviewed policy reports.

Conclusion

What do the findings of this article tell us about the broader implications of the dynamics between RRI and challenge-driven innovation policies? A first point is that the rise of challenge and mission-driven innovation policies has provided innovators and firms with new opportunities to frame controversial technologies as offering critical ‘solutions’ to key global challenges, and to re-define emerging applications as ‘socially relevant’. Our analysis of the National IB Strategy and Roadmap indicates that industry-led organizations and initiatives such as the IBLF, the BIA, and the BSI tactically adopt the discursive and anticipatory elements of the challenge-led innovation discourse and use these as a performative device in attempts to mobilize political support, shape public opinions, and pre-empt public criticism.

These findings resonate with Flyverbom and Garsten’s (2021) conceptualization of anticipatory practices in organizations and firms, as a ‘performative organizing force’. The language of grand challenges, SDGs and challenge and mission-oriented innovation policies, provide these organizations with a ‘template’ for anticipatory practices that generate representations and data of positive projected transformations, that both legitimize and support specific technologies and innovation directions. As our analysis shows, the promissory potential of challenge-driven innovation framings helps industry domains such as the UK’s IB sector to redefine its aims and identity and to create a favourable innovation environment. While the role of promissory rhetoric in the governance of science and technology has widely been explored (e.g. Konrad et al. 2016), the performativity of challenge- and mission-driven innovation discourse requires further unpacking. As our study demonstrates, the introduction of challenge framings and grand missions in mainstream European funding policies both, encourages and legitimizes a highly promissory environment for emerging technology fields, allowing innovators to link innovation aims to publicly and politically endorsed expectations of highly desirable futures. For research organizations, firms, and industry sectors such as biotech, nanotech or artificial intelligence the shift to mission and challenge-led policies provides new pathways for the positive valuation of these technologies, and novel opportunities to re-frame their potential by aligning these with mainstream and publicly-endorsed policy targets.

On the other hand, with the decreasing significance of the language and anticipatory methodologies of RRI in the wider European funding and policy landscape, core aspects of RRI, in particular the responsibility to anticipate the broader, potentially problematic aspects of innovation processes, are deemphasised and falling out of sight. As our study has shown, a commitment to RRI, and a concern with the dicier implications of emerging technologies has not only disappeared from recent IB policy documents in the UK, but is also absent in major national policy outputs, such as the 2021 ‘UK Innovation Strategy’ and the major funder’s ‘2022-2027 UKRI Strategy’. Our work suggests that these developments provide innovators in both industry and the public research sector with new opportunities to gloss over relevant concerns, and to downplay the anticipation of future risks and the less favourable effects of technology innovation, for societies and the environment.

A second point concerns the role of citizen and stakeholder engagement in the context of challenge-driven innovation framings. As Ludwig et al. (2022) have stressed, grand societal challenges are deeply complex problems, that cannot be solved by a single technology area, and that require broad public dialogue and participatory negotiations, with heterogenous perspectives and interests involved. However, as these authors have shown, in public research institutions grand and global challenges are routinely portrayed as ‘tame problems’, that can be addressed by straightforward and technical solutions that reflect the agendas and expertise of dominant actors in business and academic communities and in government, and specific technology fields. One effect is that, although many policies (including Horizon Europe) and organisations acknowledge the importance of co-creation and stakeholder engagement, in practice participatory deliberation for possible solution pathways to grand challenges (and their effects and trade-offs) is often not, or only insufficiently, implemented (c.f., Ribeiro et al. 2018). Ludwig et al. (2022) conclude in this regard, that appeals to stakeholder diversity and participation, albeit critical for developing effective responses to grand societal challenges, are for these reasons ‘largely legitimatory and symbolic exercises for solutions already in place’ (16).

Our analysis of UK IB policy documents sketches a similar picture. Proclaimed aims such as the reduction of climate change effects, pollution and poverty, are framed as manageable problems that can be solved on the basis of the expertise and technological possibilities that IB applications promise to achieve. This pre-occupation with technology and expert-driven responses to grand missions and challenges prevents a more open, broad engagement process. One finding of our analysis of the policy documents was that plans for public engagement, co-creation or participatory decision making were neither mentioned, nor encouraged. Communication with publics and stakeholders was solely portrayed as a top-down process in a deficit model fashion, aiming to inform citizens of anticipated benefits, rule out misconceptions, and to raise the sector’s public profile. This has two consequences: Firstly, in the absence of open dialogue, alignment with societal expectations and needs is mainly a deductive process: SDGs and other grand challenges that IB and other industry sectors proclaim to address are used as a proxy for public expectations, with no discussion or empirical exploration. Secondly, without broad and transparent stakeholder deliberation, the comprehensive evaluation of the feasibility, trade-offs and differential effects of specific responses to tackle grand challenges becomes impossible. This matters because approaches to address large-scale societal and environmental problems can affect stakeholders in very dissimilar ways, often with mixed results and uncertain outcomes.

This leads to a more general conclusion: The re-articulation of innovation aims in terms of grand challenges and missions provides innovation stakeholders, including firms, with new possibilities to construct representations of societal consensus and alignment, while avoiding the engagement and participatory negotiation practices through which shared understandings and aims would normally arise. As we found, the rhetorical conflation of innovation objectives with grand societal challenges in the UK’s IB sector, appears to side-line and minimize the need for broad stakeholder engagement. It reinforces notions of social relevancy and the integration of IB research objectives with public needs, while precluding a more nuanced exploration of societal expectations and values, including the identification of more localised or specific challenges (beyond grand challenges), or the needs of specific communities, social groups or regional contexts. It also disguises the material and technological objectives that underlie these representations. Despite the sweeping use of challenge-driven innovation language, the UK’s IB policies are in essence conventional instruments of industrial development, that aim to facilitate consumer pull, achieve investor confidence, promote the industrial application of synthetic biology, and establish IB as a profitable sector in the industrial landscape of the UK. While the strategic adoption of challenge framings in innovation sectors such as the UK’s IB industry may run counter to the intentions of the original architects of recent challenge-driven innovation approaches in the UK and EU (e.g. Mazzucato 2018), the context-specific and tactical deployment of challenge-led innovation language and their consequences, including for the future of RRI, needs deeper examination. Further research will be required to investigate these findings further, specifically, to explore their validity and limitations in other industry sectors in the UK and in other countries.

Ethics statement

The research that underlies this publication has been approved by the ethics committee of the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology of the University of Exeter.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous referees and editors of this journal for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work is a research output from a grant provided by Innovate UK [grant number 103564]. The time spent by the first author on the revision of this article has in part been financed by funding from the European Union [grant number 945539].

Notes on contributors

Achim Rosemann

Achim Rosemann is a Teaching Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Cambridge. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology of the University of Exeter, and an Associate Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility of De Montfort University. His research explores the intersection between technology innovation, governance, and social change in diverse global contexts, and has been funded by UKRI, the Wellcome Trust, and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.

Susan Molyneux-Hodgson

Susan Molyneux Hodgson is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter. She works in the field of science, technology and innovation studies (STI). Her overarching interest is in the everyday worlds of scientific work and how knowledge is produced through practices. She has received funding from ESRC, NERC, EPSRC, BBSRC and InnovateUK. Research projects often include collaborations with scientists in academia and in industry.

Notes

1 https://ktn-uk.org/programme/industrial-biotechnology-leadership-forum

2 Under the terms of the initial Brexit agreement, UK participation in H-EI is open but with successful applications being funded by iUK, a UK-based funding agency.