The track on Building a governance framework for responsible research and innovation will have the following aim:
The EC is actively promoting the concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) to ensure science and technology can contribute to the Innovation Union by fostering excellent science, competitive industry and better society. The grand societal challenges that lie before us are complex, interconnected and their impacts uncertain. They cannot be adequately tackled without the involvement of society. Science and technology can offer important solutions, which may come along with new inequities, uncertainties and controversies that need the deliberate involvement of society. RRI has thus been proposed as a transparent interactive process by which all societal actors and innovators become mutually responsive to each other with a view to the (ethical) acceptability, sustainability and societal desirability of the innovation process and its marketable products.
We will aim to take a collective step forward in building practical RRI governance frameworks in Europe and beyond. We propose a coherent narrative whereby multi-actor societal perspectives can be built-in upstream and throughout to the research and innovation process. It supports the joint collaboration and shared understanding between new EU research projects on RRI governance frameworks, international networking, global equity, and industrial take-up. Together, they represent a critical mass of academic engagement in RRI governance bringing together a large number of researches and experts from more than 30 institutions in over 20 countries.
See the following website for more information: http://esof2014.org/