Responsible Innovation in Large Technological Systems

J. Roland Ortt, David van Putten, Linda M. Kamp, Ibo van de Poel, J. Roland Ortt, David van Putten, Linda M. Kamp, Ibo van de Poel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000043228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Large technological systems, such as seaports, nuclear power stations, wind farms and natural gas extraction, provide vital functions for society. And yet these large technological systems have an impact on different stakeholder groups in both positive and negative ways.

This book defines responsible innovation and describes how both the innovation process and the resulting innovation outcome can be designed, created and implemented in a way that respects the various stakeholder groups involved and affected by the system. Taking a case-based approach, a number of large technological systems are profiled, including hydraulic engineering, nuclear energy, smart metering, and wind power. The values of each of the stakeholder groups, and the costs and benefits of the systems presented, are analysed. The book concludes by combining these insights to provide a framework for how responsible innovation of large technological systems can be implemented in practice.

The book will be of particular interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers in technology and innovation management, and corporate governance, CSR and business ethics.

1 Exploring responsible innovation of large technological systems in society

J. Roland Ortt, Ibo van de Poel, David van Putten and Linda M. Kamp

1.1 Introduction

1.1.1 Societal relevance of responsible innovation

Technological innovation is important. From a societal perspective, technological innovation is seen as a virtue. It has enabled the creation of products and systems that have facilitated our lives and have made our daily life more comfortable, safe and healthy. Moreover, technological innovation has allowed us to become wealthier, to travel world-wide and to communicate with people across the globe. However, technological innovation is also accompanied by severe accidents, pollution and a painful division between the haves and have-nots (Florman, 2000; Perrow, 2011). The steam engine, for example, although invented in the 18^th century, was a central system in the industrialisation era that started to change our society fundamentally from the mid-19th century on. At that time, during the 1840s, Marx was in London writing his book on the exploitation of the working class in the new industrialised society that emerged with the application of the steam engine. At the same time, just a few blocks away in the same city of London, the first World Exhibition was devoted to presenting the virtues of technological innovation (Nasar, 2011). Both perspectives, the steam engine as a virtue and as a curse, seem valid in hindsight. Many casualties were caused by steam engines that exploded. We learned in a kind of trial-and-error process to deal with the enormous pressures that steam engine vessels have to withstand. The industrial revolution around the Thames in London may have been the beginning of our wealth, yet the working class was living in deplorable neighbourhoods full of filth, poverty and diseases. This became such an enormous problem that economists devoted their work to solving this problem: how to deal with the furious competition that forced wages down to the level where workers could barely survive. At the same time, owners of the companies that benefitted from cheap labour and machines such as the steam engine became richer and richer. Marx was addressing a serious problem, and so were Malthus, Smith and many icons of economics and sociology (Nasar, 2011). Opposing views regarding the virtue (or curse) of societal changes that accompany technological innovation can be found for other technologies as well, such as communication technologies (Rogers, 1986; Short, Williams and Christie, 1976), nuclear power technology (Peters and Slovic, 1996) and many more.

1.1.2 Exploration of the concept of responsible innovation

From the era of industrialisation on, when technological innovation started to fundamentally change our society, responsibility became an issue. Several issues come to the fore when responsibility of innovation is explored.

Firstly, responsibility for whom? Responsible innovation means that different groups of stakeholders and their (sub)cultures are respected in the process of developing, implementing, operating and discarding innovations, including future generations. This also means that technological innovation should be sustainable. Technological innovation has created the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents, the resulting nuclear contamination of which will be felt for centuries. Technological innovation has also created the energy that we need for living comfortably. Technological innovation has polluted the world, significantly increased the average temperature, changed the climate and thereby caused natural disasters, wars and mass migration. Technological innovation has also enabled us to connect to and travel to people across the world. The issue of who should be considered during responsible innovation will be addressed in several practical cases in this book.

Secondly, when should responsibility be considered? Responsibility is important during the first innovation project in which a new technological system is created but it is also important during the ongoing process of improvement and growth of such systems during their whole lifetime. Responsibility is even important in the way in which the technological systems are discarded after becoming obsolete. Both perspectives on the timeframe when responsibility should be considered will be described in this book.

Thirdly, responsibility for what? What are the aspects that should be considered when we assess the responsibility of a technological innovation? Responsibility refers to a range of aspects: privacy of individuals, security, respect, a fair division of wealth, sustainability, and so on. Some of these aspects conflict with each other: maximum security against terrorism, for example, can only be created at the expense of privacy. Increase in wealth has created pollution. Apparently responsibility is about values (privacy, security, sustainability, wealth, …) and about balancing these values. The issue of which aspects should be considered during responsible innovation will also be addressed in this book.

Values change over time. In the present, we may choose, for example, to value information above all. We are currently in the process of developing bigger and better technologies for storing, transferring and analysing data. The benefits of this wealth of information are evident. Everything from traffic management to marketing and taxation is becoming more efficient. Processes are automated and money is being saved. Yet at the same time, there are other values besides efficiency that perhaps remain neglected. The privacy of individuals, the justice of the decisions made by algorithms or the fairness of the transactions of our information may not always be accounted for. Data science thus risks being a decidedly one-sided innovation, which emphasises the values of stockholders over those of stakeholders, with a potentially morally problematic situation as a result. Responsible innovation, on the other hand, implies that we develop a mode of innovation that includes consideration for these other values – indeed perhaps a way of innovating that includes as many of these considerations as possible. The future of technology and whether or not it will be a virtue or a curse depends on the conditions under which this process of innovation takes place.

In short: this book is devoted to describing and defining responsible innovation, both as a process and as an outcome, for technological systems in society.

1.1.3 Development of responsible innovation as a research topic

Responsible innovation is a most fascinating topic. In the vast literature on innovation the concept of responsible innovation is a recent and emerging concept that has gained momentum during the last decade. Many publications are devoted to describing and defining innovation. Innovation is seen as a process and as an outcome of that process. Innovation processes are described at the level of a project within companies, for example projects that are organised and structured as a stage-gate or as an agile process (Cooper, 2008 and 2014; Cervone, 2011; Paul and Singh, 2012; Sommer et al., 2015). Innovation processes are also described at the level of an industry or even society, for example the development and diffusion of plastics in the 20^th century (Dubois, 1972; Friedel, 1983). Innovation as an outcome is defined to refer to new types of organisation, production, business models, marketing mixes, products and services (Rogers, 2003). Many characterisations of these innovations in terms of their novelty, radicality or degree of disruption have appeared in the literature. Several authors have tried to give an overview of these characterisations (e.g., Garcia and Calantone, 2002; Veryzer, 1998). And yet another type of innovation has appeared: responsible innovation.

Figure 1.1 clearly shows that responsible innovation is an emerging and relatively new concept in the scientific field of innovation. The notion of responsible innovation becomes more and more developed. As we will illustrate in the next section, different definitions of responsible innovation can be found in the literature. Therefore, unification and an overarching vision of responsible innovation are required.

Figure 1.1 Number of articles published during the period 1994–2018 (25 years) on the topic of responsible innovation, found using Web of Science

1.1.4 Focus of this book

This book contributes to the emerging field of responsible innovation by addressing two research questions:

• How can responsible innovation be defined?
• How to do it?

The book will focus on large societally relevant technological systems. These systems can be utilities such as gas and electricity provision, transport systems such as the water infrastructure, and many other vital systems in our society. These systems in particular will be relevant for many different groups of stakeholders, now and in the future.

This is definitely not the first book on responsible innovation. Several of our authors contributed to earlier publications on responsible innovations during the last two decades. What is new is our specific focus on societally relevant technological systems, and the goal to combine multi-disciplinary perspectives with a deliberate focus on how to implement responsible innovation in practice.

1.1.5 Goals of this book

A first goal of the book is to illustrate how responsible innovation can be defined by discussing how it is applied or can be applied in specific cases of societally relevant large technological systems. First, in the next section of this introductory chapter, some definitions of responsible innovation as presented in the current literature will be discussed. This discussion is the first basis for the definition of responsible innovation that is developed in this book. After that, the case study descriptions in the subsequent chapters of the book all add one or more aspects to the insight into what responsible innovation can be. In the concluding chapter we will present an overarching definition based upon the contents of this book. A second goal is to show how responsible innovation can be applied in practice. What are the dilemmas, debates and issues that emerge in practice? And, secondly, what are the methods, tools and strategies to deal with them?

1.1.6 For whom is this book?

This book describes responsible innovation in terms of both the innovation process and the innovation outcome, and in doing so it focuses on historical cases of innovation in large societally relevant technological systems. The topic and focus of the book make it relevant for a variety of readers. Some of these readers benefit mainly from its scientific contribution. Masters students and scholars in the field of innovation management, ethics and related disciplines, for example, could be inspired by the diverse disciplinary perspectives on responsible innovation, the diversity of cases, the methods and tools used, and most of all, the resulting answers to the two main research questions: How can responsible innovation be defined? How to do it? Some readers benefit mainly from the practical contribution of this book. Masters students, project managers and policy makers can use the cases to find out how to make innovation processes of large societally relevant technological systems (more) responsible.

1.2 Predecessors of responsible innovation in theory and practice¹

1.2.1 Introducing predecessors

Responsible innovation, both as a process and as an outcome, has existed much longer in practice than the emergence of the term and the accompanying stream of publications (as reflected in Figure 1.1) imply. In Chapter 7, for example, it is described how innovation processes and their outcomes in the field of wind power, more than a century ago, can be considered quite responsible. During the development and implementation of wind turbines around 1900 in Denmark, the outcome of the innovation process served important societal goals, while the process of development and implementation of these wind turbines actively involved relevant stakeholders. The Danish government was able to stimulate and nurture these innovation efforts. Responsible innovation will probably exist as long as humanity develops and implements new technologies.

Responsible innovation has also existed much longer in theory than the emergence of the term and the stream of publication imply. Because of the focus of this book, how to define and implement responsible innovation of societally relevant technological systems, we would like to describe two groups of scientific literatures that preceded the notion of responsible innovation. The first group comprises two related literatures on innovation and diffusion of ‘Complex Product Systems’ (CoPS) and ‘Large Technological Systems’ (LTS). The second group refers to the literature of ‘Technology Assessment’ (TA). Both groups will be introduced and we will discuss how they paved the way for responsible innovation on societally relevant technological syste...