Managing the Responsibilities of Doing Good and Avoiding Harm in Sustainability-Orientated Innovations: Example from Agri-Tech Start-Ups in the Netherlands

Abstract

Responsible innovation (RI), also termed Responsible Research and Innovation, has emerged due to increasing concern over how to integrate ethical and societal values into research and innovation policy and governance (Von Schomberg 2013), in response to questioning of the societal role of science as well as populist resurgence in some countries (Long and Blok 2017a). Within a RI approach, innovators must consider three dimensions of responsibility, including the dimensions of (1) ‘avoiding harm’ to people and the planet, (2) ‘doing good’ through the offering of innovations that foster sustainable development, and (3) the development of facilitative global governance schemes (Voegtlin and Scherer 2017).

Options for making responsive future strategy to foster sustainability transitions in the German agri-food sector: a Delphi-based approach

“…Thereby, RRI acknowledges that sustainability for the one does not per se imply sustainability for the other. In contrast, different expectations, desires, and needs have to be anticipated and reflected upon during assessments to foster the best possible outcomes by responding to generated knowledge [31,47,66]. One option to modify the Delphi method accordingly was to build the third-round not solely on the anticipated knowledge regarding desirability and probability from the previous rounds, but also on the in-depth examination and analysis of the intended and unintended impacts of innovation-driven changes on various sustainability dimensions.…”