Improvement of sensitivity towards responsible innovation in practice

Abstract

AIMS OF THE STUDY

Research, development and innovation promises significant development and higher welfare, but risks of unpredicted effects and ethical dilemmas can be close connected to these processes. Avoiding these effects may happen only after the appearance of the innovation results, but intervention at that time is late and expensive. As a preventive answer to this challenge, responsible innovation emerged but its integration into daily research activities is still a serious challenge. The so-called Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR), which has documented results of more years, may help to overcome this situation since, according to its basic logic, STIR incorporates social science aspects into natural science researches and decisions. This method has been applied in developed countries so far, so we do not have information how STIR can work in an innovation environment of a less developed country. Present study aims to analyze how responsible innovation can be applied in practice of research groups in Hungary.

METHODOLOGY

During the research, the method of STIR was tested in two research groups at the University of Szeged: a humanist was integrated in the work of these research groups for 12 weeks.

RESULTS

The novelty of the research is that this is the first pilot project conducted in a relatively underdeveloped country. The results show that sensitivity of the selected research groups increased towards responsible innovation, and it is also realized that STIR can be used in an innovation environment differing from that of developed countries.

POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS

As a final conclusion we can state the following practical recommendation: preparing and improving a tailor- made method for less developed countries is essential because of their different innovation environment in order to be able to increase the sensitivity of researchers towards responsible innovation.