Responsible research and innovation in Europe: A cross-country comparative analysis

Abstract

The objective of this article is to contribute to the emerging attempts to foster empirical, quantitative approaches to Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), and to provide a low-resolution map of the European RRI landscape, which can serve as a vehicle for international learning. The article presents indicators of RRI aimed at characterising countries. It examines the empirical structure of the data collected in the ‘Monitoring the evolution and benefits of Responsible Research and Innovation’ (MoRRI) project and reports patterns across Europe. Factor analysis is applied to identify 11 empirically-anchored dimensions of RRI. Based on indices for these dimensions, cluster analysis reveals four distinct clusters of countries. These results point to diversity regarding the empirically-manifest components of RRI as well as diversity in the RRI profiles of the 28 European Union Member States.

Public communication by research institutes compared across countries and sciences: Building capacity for engagement or competing for visibility?

“…This work has however been recorded at the national level. Little is known about how the activity compares across institutes in different countries, with distinct traditions of public engagement in science [ 16 ] [ 17 ], scientific systems, and R&D resources [ 18 ], that allows for a broader understanding of this capacity building in contexts of internationally increasing public engagement demands [ 19 ] [ 20 ] [ 6 ].…”

“…Yet, the question relating to how science communication varies across countries and global regions has received very little attention. The handful of cross-country comparisons point to some country variation in science communication [ 27 ] [ 16 ] [ 28 ] [ 25 ], but these variations are small among scientists. More recent research shows that this activity associates with the organisational contexts in which scientists work: our global survey of astronomers (N = 2,600) showed that those scientists working with more resources from their institutions were also more active communicators, regardless of the global region in which they worked [ 25 ].…”

Synthesizing an implementation framework for responsible research and innovation

“…Since we based our framework on early RRI literature (published between 2011 and 2015), we compared our framework with RRI frameworks published since 2015 (Foley, Bernstein, and Wiek 2016;Jirotka et al 2016;Lubberink et al 2017b;Macnaghten, Owen, and Jackson 2016;Mejlgaard, Bloch, and Madsen 2018;Ribeiro, Smith, and Millar 2017;Silva et al 2018;Stahl and Coeckelbergh 2016;Stahl et al 2017;Tait 2017;Van de Poel et al 2017).…”

“…Like our framework, most frameworks published since 2015 aimed to make RRI more concrete to support its implementation in practice (Foley, Bernstein, and Wiek 2016;Lubberink et al 2017b;Mejlgaard, Bloch, and Madsen 2018;Ribeiro, Smith, and Millar 2017;Silva et al 2018;Stahl et al 2017;Van de Poel et al 2017). Foley, Bernstein, and Wiek (2016) for example add the dimension 'coordination' to make more explicit how the other dimensions, especially engagement, should be performed, Ribeiro, Smith, and Millar (2017) While several of these frameworks emphasize that responsible processes do not guarantee responsible products (e.g.…”

Comparative analysis of innovation performance of European Union countries

“…Authors emphasize importance of additional in depth analysis to acquire more representative measure of innovation performance. Mejlgaard et al (2019) Crişan et al (2018) focused their examination on the European Union least performing countries: Bulgaria and Romania. According to the SII data in the period from 2010 to 2016 EU innovation performance has increased but not all members participated equally.…”