Policy transfer and shared knowledge base
Learning from policy implementation
Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in the European Union and Scientific Social Responsibility (SSR) in India
The NewHoRRIzon project published its third policy brief in March 2020, co-authored by Robert Braun, Gianni Robert and Srinivas Krishna Ravi with contributions from the NewHoRRIzon team.
One of the remits of NewHoRRIzon is to integrate non-EU territories in its research and coordination activities. Therefore, we have worked together with different institutions to assess the state of responsibility in R&I in India, the West Indies and in Colombia and make recommendations for the EC how to better integrate global efforts in its policies on RRI.
Our third Policy Brief deals with similarities and differences of responsibility of R&I as applied in India and in the EU, and make recommendations as how to better align such principles and practices and offer mutual learning, collaboration between the respective territories.
Several EU projects dealt with policy exchange between EU and non-EU research arenas. These projects have already highlighted the necessity for RRI to be participatory and flexible with regard to their contexts of application and have pointed to the potential cross-fertilization of ethical frameworks between EU and non-EU countries. It was also suggested that frameworks of social innovation as well as frugal innovation should be conceived as contextual variations to integrate different objectives.
Our policy brief suggests that in order to increase the ability of societies to deal with social challenges presented by new, disruptive technologies a global framework for responsible innovation (RI) is to be developed. The development of such a framework may benefit from the exchange of experiences in the EU and India.
Our specific suggestions include to set up a joint Working Group comprising of researchers and policy makers from India and the EU to discuss and facilitate policy exchange between the respective territories in RRI and SSR. Besides this we also suggest to utilize research results and learning generated by analyzing RRI policy implementation challenges in H2020; to exploit experience in raising awareness and building capacity by RRI policy implementation networks across Europe; to utilize experience in the development of “Key Performance Indicators” based in the 2015 Expert Group on Policy Indicators for Responsible Research and Innovation; to apply specific, tested and applied methods for engaging different stakeholders in a structured form to address wider societal challenges; and to jointly further advance the online Societal-Readiness (SR) Thinking Tool, developed by the NewHoRRIzon project.
Download our third NewHoRRIzon policy brief here.
