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The demand of a new generation of public services is leading to a systematic exploration of what design can do for public organisations. If the rapid growth of service design practices spread the idea that design is not just focused on tangible artefacts, the effects of their introduction in public organisations are still underestimated. This article explores the ongoing trend of the adoption of design as a practice to deal with the innovation of public services through the discussion of three cases, in the light of the hypothesis that the introduction of design knowledge in public institutions should be reconnected to the management of their organisational changes. In particular in the analysis of the cases the authors discuss evidences in favour of a new interpretative framework in which the design of new artefacts (service, processes and solutions) can be described as a powerful yet implicit agent of change

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has emerged in recent years, in Europe and across the world, as a model of scientific and technological advancement that is the result of the cooperation of actors that traditionally worked in an autonomous way. Advanced perspectives on RRI suggest how knowledge and solutions should be co-produced by diverse actors working in synergy, including civil society and citizens. This article introduces the notion of cocreation as a framework to operationalize RRI. The article discusses insights coming from ten labs across Europe, where experiments in co-design processes and tools are designing and testing solutions to societal challenges under diverse science, technology and innovation (STI) policies. Furthermore, it compares empirical insights with the debate on experimentation of co-creation practices in STI policy making and on the potentialities and limitations of design for policy. Moreover, the article discusses the restricted focus of RRI, which has primarily concentrated on scientific and technological research and science-based innovation, highlighting the need to include other forms of innovation (like social and human centered innovation) and perspectives to sustain the concrete uptake of RRI in diverse contexts.

In the last decade, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has earned a prominent position in policy spheres by offering forward-looking approaches and a framework for reflecting on the societal impact of research and innovation. Nevertheless, RRI remains an immature and relatively narrow area of inquiry, with a top-down approach and guided by standardized principles. Further, the field lacks focus on how researchers, firms and other actors actually perform responsible research and innovation. By unveiling the heterogeneity of responsibility practice, this special issue broadens RRI's scope in two ways. First, by expanding RRI's narrow focus on the research processes towards an approach that also takes into account how new knowledge and new ideas are becoming research-based innovations in society. Second, by including a wider spectrum of responsible innovation processes, and not only those that are research-driven. This special issue includes 10 investigations of heterogeneous responsible innovation practices that cross sectors and regions. Using the lessons these contributions teach, we close the issue with suggestions for a new multidimensional, multi-scale avenue for RRI.

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