Responsible Innovation

Managing the Responsible Emergence of Science and Innovation in Society

Richard Owen, John R. Bessant, Maggy Heintz, Richard Owen, John R. Bessant, Maggy Heintz

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781119966357, 9781119966364
• eBook ISBN: 9781118551400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Science and innovation have the power to transform our lives and the world we live in - for better or worse – in ways that often transcend borders and generations: from the innovation of complex financial products that played such an important role in the recent financial crisis to current proposals to intentionally engineer our Earth's climate. The promise of science and innovation brings with it ethical dilemmas and impacts which are often uncertain and unpredictable: it is often only once these have emerged that we feel able to control them. How do we undertake science and innovation responsibly under such conditions, towards not only socially acceptable, but socially desirable goals and in a way that is democratic, equitable and sustainable? Responsible innovation challenges us all to think about our responsibilities for the future, as scientists, innovators and citizens, and to act upon these.

This book begins with a description of the current landscape of innovation and in subsequent chapters offers perspectives on the emerging concept of responsible innovation and its historical foundations, including key elements of a responsible innovation approach and examples of practical implementation.  

Written in a constructive and accessible way, Responsible Innovation includes chapters on:

• Innovation and its management in the 21st century
• A vision and framework for responsible innovation
• Concepts of future-oriented responsibility as an underpinning philosophy
• Values – sensitive design
• Key themes of anticipation, reflection, deliberation and responsiveness
• Multi – level governance and regulation
• Perspectives on responsible innovation in finance, ICT, geoengineering and nanotechnology

Essentially multidisciplinary in nature, this landmark text combines research from the fields of science and technology studies, philosophy, innovation governance, business studies and beyond to address the question, "How do we ensure the responsible emergence of science and innovation in society?"

Chapter 1

Innovation in the Twenty-First Century

John Bessant

University of Exeter Business School, UK

1.1 Introduction

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change

(Charles Darwin)

Darwin was right. His famous comment underlines one of the key challenges facing organizations—unless they are prepared to change what they offer the world and the ways they create and deliver those offerings they could be in trouble. The challenge is not whether or not to innovate, but how? This makes building the capability to deliver a steady stream of innovation a strategic imperative, not just for commercial organizations, but for any enterprise dealing with the turbulent conditions of the early twenty-first century. Public services struggling to balance rising demand and expectations of high quality delivery against the rising costs of provision need to seek new ways of meeting social needs. Third sector organizations concerned with improving social conditions recognize the importance of thinking and working in new directions if they are to gain attention and acquire the resources they need to carry through their agenda.

Innovation is about change and this can take place along a spectrum of increasing novelty, from simple incremental improvements—“doing what we do, but better”—through to radical, new to the world changes. The risks involved vary, as do the benefits,but it is clear that even sustaining growth through incremental innovation is not going to happen by accident. Any organization might get lucky once but in order to be able to repeat the trick there is a need for some kind of organized, structured approach to managing the process. This needs to find answers to two key questions:

• Where can we innovate?

and

• How can we innovate?

The trouble is that innovation involves trying to hit a moving target. Environments constantly shift and pose new threats—new technologies appear, new markets emerge, the regulatory framework changes—and unless organizations have the capacity to innovate their approaches to innovation they may not survive in the long term. History is clear about this—very few organizations are long-term survivors and those which have managed to stick around for over 100 years have made some major changes to what they do and how they do it (Francis et al., 2003).

Sometimes the changes are pretty dramatic, challenging the roots of where the company began and overturning a lot in the process. TUI, for example, is the largest European travel and tourism services company, owning (amongst others) Thomson Holidays, Britannia Airways, and Lunn Poly travel agents. Its origins, however, go back to 1917 where it began as the Prussian state-owned lead mining and smelting company! Nokia's key role as a leader in mobile telephony hides its origins as a diverse timber products conglomerate with interests as wide as rubber boots and toilet paper! One of the oldest companies in the world is the Stora company in Sweden, which was founded in the twelfth century as a timber cutting and processing operation. It is still thriving today—albeit in the very different areas of food processing and electronics.

A key dimension when exploring innovation lies in the concept of responsibility. Clearly, not all innovations are necessarily good things. Others may start out offering positive benefits, but later turn out to have unintended negative consequences. The famous example of DDT is a case in point—originally hailed as a breakthrough innovation in the field of pesticides it later turned out to have significant negative impacts. Other examples include the pharmaceutical thalidomide, nuclear power, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used as refrigerants and propellants.

The key issue is around how far we explore and consider innovation in its early stages in terms of the potential impacts it might have, and how far we are able and prepared to modify, ameliorate, or possibly abandon, projects which have the potential for negative effects—what Owen et al. (Chapter 2) describe as the dimension of responsiveness. It is this dimension and others (anticipation, reflection, and deliberation) which together underpin the concept of responsible innovation. The ways in which this can be conceptualized and operationalized in the face of uncertainty form the core theme of this book. Interestingly, much of the academic and policy-oriented innovation research tradition evolved around such concerns, riding on the back of the science and society movement in the 1970s. This led to key institutes (like the Science Policy Research unit at Sussex University) being established (Cole et al., 1973). While a sophisticated toolkit of approaches and resources emerged from much of this pioneering work, its use has often been limited and considerations of “responsible innovation” have often been marginalized in strategic management thinking (although there have been some high profile exceptions, such as the long-running debate around genetically modified food—see Von Schomberg (Chapter 3).

The key themes and content of responsible innovation will be explored in detail in later chapters in this book. The purpose of this chapter is to look at how the twenty-first century environment is changing and the challenges this poses for innovating organizations: important context for the discussions of responsible innovation that follow. In the face of some radical technological, market, social, and political shifts, how should they be thinking in terms of adapting and configuring their innovation processes? What are the strategic options open to them and how could they best explore the innovation space? Of the bundle of learned behavior patterns which they make use of, which ones should they be doing more of, reinforcing and strengthening? Which ones should they be doing less of, or even stopping—things which worked in the past but may no longer be suitable approaches? And which new behaviors are they going to need to learn and practice to take advantage of the newly—emerging context in which they are operating?

Before we move to the challenges it is worth spending a little time looking at two core questions around where and how organizations could innovate.

1.2 How Can We Innovate?—Innovation as a Process

Unlike the cartoon image, innovation requires a little more than just a light-bulb moment as an idea flashes above someone's head. In reality it involves a journey, growing and shaping the original trigger idea into something which can spread across a population and create value. As Figure 1.1 shows, traveling along this road means finding answers to some key questions:

Figure 1.1 Simple model of the innovation process (Reprinted with permission from [Tidd and Bessant, 2009] Copyright (2009) John Wiley & Sons Ltd)

No organization starts with a perfect model of the innovation process. Instead it is something they build up through a learning process, trying out new behaviors and hanging on to those which work. Eventually these patterns of repeated and learned behaviors—“routines”—become embedded in “the way we do things around here” and take shape in the form of policies, procedures, and rules (Nelson and Winter, 1982; Zollo and Winter, 2002). They will vary between organizations—everyone finds their own particular way of answering the basic questions and some recipes work better than others. This is useful, since it allows us to learn not only through experience but also by watching how others manage the innovation task and grafting on useful new approaches and ideas.

However, we should also recognize that learning to manage innovation is not just a matter of building capability to deal with the questions of searching, selecting, implementing, and so on. Environments are unpredictable and complex, so we don't know what will emerge in the way of new threats or opportunities. So the key to long-term innovation management success is to build “dynamic capability”—to be able to step back and review our innovation process and reconfigure it on a continuing basis (Teece et al., 1997). This is as much about letting go of old routines as it is about developing new ones.

1.3 Where Could We Innovate?—Innovation Strategy

Innovation can take many different forms—as Figure 1.2 suggests, there is plenty of space to explore (Francis and Bessant, 2005). We can think of four core dimensions:

• “product innovation”—changes in the things (products/services) which an organization offers;
• “process innovation”—changes in the ways in which products and services are created and delivered;
• “position innovation”—changes in the context in which the products/services are introduced;
• “paradigm innovation”—changes in the underlying mental models which frame what the organization does.

Table 1.1 gives some examples of these. In reality, of course, various combinations of incremental and radical innovation across these fields are possible. The key issue for any organization is to ensure that it explores its options thoroughly—it may choose not to pursue every idea but it is important to avoid being surprised!

Figure 1.2 Exploring the innovation space (Reprinted with permission from [Tidd and Bessant, 2009] Copyright (2009) John Wiley & Sons Ltd)

Table 1.1 Potential directions for innovation strategy

Innovation type	Incremental—do what we do but better	Radical—do something different
Product—what we offer the world	Windows 7® and Windows 8® replacing Vista® and XP®—essentially improving on an existing software idea	New to the world software—for example, the first speech recognition program
	New versions of established car models—for example, the VW Golf essentially improving on established car design	Toyota Prius—bringing a new concept—hybrid engines. Tesla—high performance electric car.
	Improved performance incandescent light bulbs	LED-based lighting, using completely different and more energy efficient principles
	CDs replacing vinyl records—essentially improving on the storage technology	Spotify® and other music streaming services—changing the pattern from owning your own collection to renting a vast library of music
Process—how we create and deliver that offering	Improved fixed line telephone services	Skype® and similar systems
	Extended range of stock broking services	On-line share trading
	Improved auction house operations	eBay®
	Improved factory operations efficiency through upgraded equipment	Toyota Production System® and other “lean” approaches
	Improved range of banking services delivered at branch banks	Online banking and now mobile banking in Kenya, Philippines—using phones as an alternative to banking systems
	Improved retailing logistics	On line shopping
Position—where we target that offering and the story we tell about it	Häagen-Daz® changing the target market for ice cream, from children to consenting adults	Addressing underserved markets—for example, the Tata Nano aimed at the emerging but relatively poor Indian market with cars priced around $2000
	Airlines segmenting service offering for different passenger groups—Virgin Upper Class, BA Premium Economy, and so on	Low cost airlines opening up air travel to those previously unable to afford it—create new markets and also disrupt existing ones
	Dell® and others segmenting and customizing computer configuration for individual users	Variations on the “One laptop per child” project—for example, Indian government $20 computer for schools
	On line support for traditional higher education courses	University of Phoenix and others, building large education b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword: Why Responsible Innovation?
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• Chapter 1: Innovation in the Twenty-First Century
• Chapter 2: A Framework for Responsible Innovation
• Chapter 3: A Vision of Responsible Research and Innovation
• Chapter 4: Value Sensitive Design and Responsible Innovation
• Chapter 5: Responsible Innovation—Opening Up Dialogue and Debate
• Chapter 6: “Daddy, Can I Have a Puddle Gator?”: Creativity, Anticipation, and Responsible Innovation
• Chapter 7: What Is “Responsible” about Responsible Innovation? Understanding the Ethical Issues
• Chapter 8: Adaptive Governance for Responsible Innovation
• Chapter 9: Responsible Innovation: Multi-Level Dynamics and Soft Intervention Practices
• Chapter 10: Responsible Innovation in Finance: Directions and Implications
• Chapter 11: Responsible Research and Innovation in Information and Communication Technology: Identifying and Engaging with the Ethical Implications of ICTs
• Chapter 12: Deliberation and Responsible Innovation: a Geoengineering Case Study
• Chapter 13: Visions, Hype, and Expectations: a Place for Responsibility
• Building Capacity for Responsible Innovation
• Name Index
• Subject Index