Does responsible research and innovation exist?

Five keys of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is a term rooted in the history of advocating for socio-ethical awareness in scientific research. Whilst the discourse on scientific integrity has long existed, RRI emerged from the terminology of the European Union and gained traction as a key focus of the EU’s Horizon 2020 program for scientific funding. The EU defines RRI as “an approach that anticipates and assesses potential implications and societal expectations with regard to research and innovation, with the aim to foster the design of inclusive and sustainable research and innovation”. But looking beyond the jargon, what are the bare facts of this definition and is it a plausible approach for commercial innovators?

Previous efforts to formalise a framework for responsible research and innovation can help us to make sense of the specific context which RRI inhabits. The Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) program founded in 1990 is recognised as a prominent antecedent. Established by the organisers of the Human Genome Project, the ELSI program aimed to identify and address the consequences of genomic research such as the ramifications for privacy. Critics of ELSI, however, have characterized the program as a box-ticking exercise “only concerned with regulation of downstream consequences”. More recent endeavours, such as the Responsible Innovation (RI) approach, have signalled a shift towards proactively moulding the consequences themselves. Exploring this concept in their 2019 paper “Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation”, authors Owen and Pansera emphasize how RI diverges from its predecessors in first asking “what kind of future we want innovation to create”. In doing so, RI has moved away from mitigating risk towards achieving outcomes. Although rooted in academia as opposed to policy, RI therefore shares the aspirational ideology of its cousin RRI. Where the two differ, despite often being used interchangeably, is the focus on how the research itself is conducted. RRI challenges not only what we want to create, but how we want to create it.

Much of the criticism levied at RRI is due precisely to these semantic shifts and whether the acronym du jour is merely a reincarnation of the same concept. Writing about his involvement in the EU’s Horizon 2020 program, professor Arie Rip admitted that the very body advising on RRI did not even know what RRI was! This ambiguity surely leaves RRI open to misappropriation by entities seeking what critics have called a “social license to operate”. A parallel could certainly be drawn here between the practice of greenwashing (portraying a brand, product or organization as more eco-friendly than it really is) and the temptation of positive PR that the RRI seal of approval could lend. This alone erodes RRI’s plausibility given that transparency is considered one of its central elements.

Whilst the research component of RRI conjures up images of academia, innovation often occupies a more commercial context. Yet it is here that the principles of transparency and open access promoted by RRI are again undermined. The very concept of novelty, and of ideas not being shared, creates the competitive advantage that innovation is supposed to offer. The much-touted theory of “disruptive innovation”, for example, posits that a successful innovation derives its worth from its ability to usurp existing products. This can hardly be said to incentivise openness. However, alternative concepts such as open innovation echo the sentiments of RRI.

A reference to open innovation wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the invention of the graphical user interface (GUI) at Xerox Parc in the 1970s. As the story goes, the engineers at Xerox had developed a user-friendly interface replete with mouse and keyboard but the executives did not think it could be commercially viable. After inviting industry insiders to view their research, Steve Jobs either developed or stole their idea (depending on who you ask) and the behemoths of Apple and Microsoft were born. Though undoubtedly a mythologized version of events, can Xerox’s approach to innovation be considered a plausible one? The innovation undoubtedly benefitted society, but the commercial interests of the innovators were arguably underserved.

Engaging actors and policy agendas of the European Commission’s RRI framework. Source: https://rri-tools.eu/about-rri.

Yet to focus only on the Open Access aspect of RRI ignores the other key pillars, of which public engagement seems particularly pertinent since the advent of social media platforms. With many innovations in data science relying on the use of personal data at massive scale, for example algorithms used by the Big Four (Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook) for recommender systems, the information asymmetry between platform and user is arguably ripe for a new approach which redresses this imbalance. In her 2014 essay “A Digital Declaration”, Shoshana Zuboff echoed this sentiment when she coined the term “surveillance capitalism” to describe what she views as the increasing commodification of personal data. Given that the EU describes RRI as a collaborative process in which societal actors are “mutually responsive to each other”, Zuboff’s perspective certainly puts paid to the notion of the Big Four exercising RRI given there is plentiful engagement from the public but little public engagement.

Considering whether RRI is a plausible approach to adopt in the context of commercial technology innovation also begs the question of what constitutes the commercial context. If in many places around the world Facebook is synonymous with the internet, many have asked whether it should it be considered a public utility and regulated as such? This blurring of boundaries perhaps suggests that RRI is not suitable for the task at hand; it’s an approach, not a regulation. The recent whistleblowing activities of former Facebook employee Frances Haugen lend weight to this conclusion. Accusing the social media giant of targeting vulnerable and often younger users of the platform with radicalising content and misinformation, Haugen pointed to the inefficacy of existing frameworks when she insisted “Until we bring in a counterweight, these things will be operated for the shareholders’ interest and not the public interest”.

A significant shortcoming of RRI is this inherent contradiction between the socio-political and economic systems in which it operates. A damning assessment of our efforts to close this ideological gap was provided by Robert Cook-Deegan, whose history of the Human Genome Project contained the memorable caveat: “Where the cash went, ethics followed”. Writing on ethics in Big Data research, authors Metcalf and Crawford observe how data science has enabled us to link together vast sets of previously unconnected data. They highlight that has this has not only changed what we know, but perhaps more pertinently how we know it. In parallel, RRI has matured from a concept concerning what we want to innovate to a process of how we want to get there. Whilst this conceptual shift therefore seems compatible with developments in data science, what seems to be lacking is our ability to implement it. RRI is not a plausible approach, rather it has become a necessary one.