The Role of an RSU Approach in Responsible Innovation

Social sciences and humanities’ researches are imbedded in different support procedures, which may vary methodologically and theoretically but they all aim at bringing scientific invention to market, in others words: at innovation. Each approach has assumptions about society and the way to account for the social impacts of innovation. The RSU approach is not different. It is important, therefore, to clarify the social pertinence of such an approach for responsible innovation.

To situate the RSU procedure within the responsible innovation movement as a whole (Owen et al. 2013; van den Hoven et al. 2014; Koops et al. 2015), it’s important to provide a brief sketch of the evolution of technological assessment (TA) since it emerged as a phenomenon. What is today called responsible innovation has arisen in the context of social transformation and of the practice of technological assessment. In the book Technological Assessment for Responsible Innovation, Grunwald (2014, p. 17) states that the roots of responsible innovation in TA must be recognized if they properly grasp the continuity that exists in social aims, despite the transformations that have occurred in the commercial and social context. Since TA first came on the scene, the aim has been to reconcile technology with the claims of society. During the 1970s, the prevailing view was that technology must unfold according to its own rules and that the State’s role was to react once a given technology had been placed on the market. (Grunwald 2013, 2014). In line with this view, the reconciling of technological development, the marketplace, and society took place in three stages: the creation of a new technology, its market launch, and State regulation designed to protect the public when negative impacts arose.

What is known as Collingridge’s dilemma arises in a context in which technological development and the marketplace are faced with social controls: “One possible explanation for the relative lack of visible interaction of regulators with responsible innovation processes can be found in Collingridge’s dilemma: controlling a technology is difficult in its early stages because not enough is known of its possible or probable effects, and it is also difficult once the technology is well-developed because by then intervention is expensive and drastic (Collingridge 1980)” (Koops 2015, p. 10). Bear in mind that the concept of social control prevailing at the time (and still today, for that matter) rests on regulatory law: control is exerted by imposing on a product its compliance with regulatory standards. Moreover, in regulatory law, the only impacts considered are those known to exist for health, safety, and the environment, as demonstrated by those toxicological analyses that are taken into account. Other impacts by technologies on society, often coming under the rubric of ethical, legal, and social concerns, are in the sole purview of economic-development players. It is in this context that partners from the social sciences and the humanities came to be called upon to help foster a product’s acceptance by users. Studies conducted in the social sciences and the humanities that aimed at a better understanding of acceptance, at measuring acceptance, and at developing tools to promote it tended to cluster around the technology acceptance model (TAM). Studies in that field sought to identify the explanatory factors in a technology’s acceptance. As presented by Davis et al. 1989, research on the acceptance of computers was intended to better predict, explain, and increase user acceptance. According to Venkatesh and Bala (2008), a TAM 3 stage was reached, which provides better breakdowns of explanatory factors, whereas Egea and Gonzalez (2011) maintain that the TAM should incorporate factors such as confidence and risk. Centered exclusively on promoting technological development, these approaches yield studies that do not take the dimension of social impacts into account.

Constructive technological assessment (CTA) arose as a way of solving Collingridge’s dilemma: “Institutionally, an indication of the separation between ‘promotion’ and ‘control’ is the division of labour between government ministries, some promoting the development of new technologies and innovation, while other ministries consider impacts and regulation. TA emerged within this regime of handling technology in society, and was institutionalized at the ‘control’ side of the division of labour. An important argument was (and is) the asymmetry between technology development actors and society at large, with the latter coming in at a late stage, and little information about the technology. The asymmetry is structural, but TA would offer information and considerations to the ‘control’ side, and reduce the asymmetry. CTA aims to compensate for the asymmetry in TA approaches, by focusing on technology development” (Rip and Robinson 2013, p. 39). Note that these authors implicitly emphasize the change in the issues at stake in technological development and the marketplace, because they view the tension between promotion and control as having penetrated political structures themselves. And indeed, in many states, the close ties between technological development and economic prosperity justify investment of public moneys in numerous initiatives for technological development, such as nanotechnologies. This involvement of the State in the funding of research with a view to economic development compels mediation within the government itself.

As a response to Collingridge’s dilemma, CTA seeks to incorporate concern with social impacts by means of reflection on the process of technological development. That is, to the extent that processes take the social dimension into account from the earliest stages of technological development, it will be possible to reduce the human costs associated with the trial-and-error approach that characterizes the way technologies are integrated into society, as illustrated by the case of GMOs.

Nowadays, in democratic societies, government bodies play a key role in technology regulation through all the laws that affect a given sphere, such as health, the environment, civil liability, and so on. It is not surprising that the Rathenau Instituut, created in the Netherlands in 1978 with the mission of promoting the formation of political and public opinion on science and technology, has developed yet another approach to TA, namely political TA (van Est 2013).

As has been shown in studies by Jasanoff (1998, 2003, 2005, 2011), the pact between science and regulatory law has been severely challenged by the new technologies. Science was and still is at the heart of the devising of regulatory law (hard law), since, by providing analyses of toxicity in relation to health, safety, and the environment, it underpins the determination of acceptable thresholds of risk. The critiques Jasanoff directs at technological development aim for the inclusion of consideration of other types of impact in State regulation. These would include impacts related to ethical and social concerns. Here, reflection on technological development comes down to the capacity for reflection of the law in connection with its way of understanding technological development. The call for an E³LS approach to replace the existing “health, safety, and the environment” (HSE) approach is at the heart of the issues associated with governance and technological development (Patenaude and Legault 2014). As well, the way technological development itself generates new social practices that challenge current legislation should not be underestimated. In the RSU procedure, analysis of the legal impacts of technology, flowing from both components and uses, allows for revealing how current law can impede the development of new technologies. Findings of this kind make it possible to better document the inadequacies of the law vis-à-vis technological development. In this way, the RSU procedure can contribute to political TA.

The TA, CTA, and political TA approaches all seek to reconcile technological development with society through engagement with legal and governmental authorities. Legal standard setting serves as a reference point for the establishment of social control. Other responsible-innovation approaches direct their actions towards players in the laboratory. Responsible-innovation actions seeking to influence technological development through a presence in the laboratory operate with two foci: that of the product, which will be brought to completion while incorporating social dimensions into the process; and that of the players, who must decide, in light of the information and procedures, what products (and attendant uses) to bring to completion. The distinction proposed by von Schomberg (2014) between a product approach and a process approach provides a way of characterizing the different targets for action: “Product dimension: Products be [sic] evaluated and designed with a view to their normative anchor points: high level of protection to the environment and human health, sustainability, and societal desirability. Process dimension: The challenge here is to arrive at a more responsive, adaptive and integrated management of the innovation process. A multidisciplinary approach with the involvement of stakeholders and other interested parties should lead to an inclusive innovation process whereby technical innovators become responsive to societal needs and societal actors become co-responsible for the innovation process by a constructive input in terms of defining societal desirable products” (p. 41). Koops (2015), on the other hand, proposes a distinction that better clarifies how procedures differ in the various approaches, with some focused on producing tools for incorporation and others on the way to proceed with the players: “The product and process approaches that I discern relate more to the approach to responsible innovation: the enterprise of responsible innovation can be seen as a product (something that is developed and then used) or a process (something that is on-going and recursive)” (p. 6). Practically speaking, the approaches can be grouped into those that develop tools and those that provide a method of intervening with players. They also vary according to the choice of players involved in the process.

The aim of the value sensitive design approach is, as was mentioned in the Introduction, to influence technological design by incorporating social impacts through values. This approach involves three levels of examination. The first is conceptual: it consists of asking about the design’s direct and indirect impact on stakeholders, as well as asking how values are involved and what are the trade-offs implied between values. The second consists of complementing the conceptual analysis by field investigations allowing for a better understanding of the technology’s place in society. The third and last consists of carrying out technical investigations to see how the technology sustains certain values or impedes them (Freidman et al. 2008, 70–71, 2013, 60–61). The steps involving the players concerned with the technology should make it possible to improve existing technologies or promote the emergence of responsible innovation.

The RSU procedure has several points in common with the value sensitive design approach. The most important of these is the aim of understanding the technology’s impacts on all stakeholders. Any ethical analysis must be based on this necessary identification, for it is these impacts, some negative and some positive, that it will be possible to assess. This involves empirical et technological analyses. The two approaches also share, as their normative framework, values rather than moral norms; but they differ in how they conceive values. The RSU procedure is organized around the concept of value judgments made regarding the negative and positive impacts, and the weighting of these when reaching the final decision. Value sensitive design proposes a classification of values (moral and nonmoral) that would allow for a correspondence between values and positive and negative impacts, without clearly specifying the role of values in the rational discussion entailed by the weighting of the conflicting values: “For the purposes of design, value conflicts should usually not be conceived of as ‘either/or’ situations, but as constraints on the design space. Admittedly, at times designs that support one value directly hinder support for another. In those instances, a good deal of discussion among the stakeholders may be warranted to identify the space of workable solutions” (Freidman et al. 2008, p. 89, 2013, p. 77).

Finally, the actions taken in the RSU procedure prioritize reflection on the product’s development and on uses. In this respect, the procedure aims to further players’ reflective capabilities as the development of a given product or device unfolds.

Other responsible innovation approaches prioritize steps taken with the players by prompting reflective practices through various means. Approaches centered on the processes involved in technological development tend, as observed by Koops (2015), to focus on learning: “Moving towards the other end of the spectrum, the process approach can be characterised as a focus on developing self-learning procedures that can be used to make innovation in a certain context more responsible” (p. 7). Thus approaches vary according to the context envisaged, the learning goals, and the tools developed. The social-technical integration research (STIR) approach focuses its activities on players in the laboratory. The objective is to promote players’ reflectiveness about their practices by exposing them to the social dimensions involved. The experience with this approach suggests it is effective: “Specifically, practitioners who participate in the STIR experience have been shown to become more reflexively aware of socio-ethical contexts, to alter their decision processes, and to change the nature and direction of their work in light of the collaborative inquiry” (Fisher and Schuurbiers 2013, p. 98). The procedure, then, aims to promote reflection about the presuppositions underlying one’s practice and thus provide players with a critical distance that may be placed at the service of the renewal of practice. As was notified above, the RSU procedure also aims to develop players’ reflective capabilities regarding their own practice in order to guide technological development. The procedure presupposes that reflection on the choices involved in the technological development will promote collective learning.

The NAME method (network approach for moral evaluation) differs from the approaches above in several ways. The procedure involved is not solely focused on players in the laboratory, but rather targets all the players and their ability to own, each at their own levels, the responsibility for moral issues: “The focus of the approach is on how the actors within an R&D network can actively take up their responsibility for addressing such issues. We are particularly interested in the moral issues that arise due to the use of the eventual innovation or artifact being developed and the need to anticipate these issue.” (Van de Poel and Doorn 2013, p. 112). The procedure undertaken and the tools used will depend on the network of players involved, given that the introduction into society of new technologies always involves several players beyond the designers. As well, this approach identifies itself as a parallel research process. Although the research is rooted in the context, working with the players involved, the moral evaluation is carried out in tandem with the technological development itself. The RSU procedure, by involving not just designers in the laboratory but the players concerned with marketing as well, addresses a concern of the NAME method, that is, the need to work in a network. In the case of the RSU procedure, the network is limited, since only players directly involved in decisions about development and marketing are called upon to participate. In contrast to NAME, the procedure is incorporated into the development process and calls for a values-based approach rather than for recourse to a particular moral philosophy.