Making responsibility a reality

Ignasi López-Verdeguer and Melanie Smallman describe a project to build tools to help research work with and for society.

Responsible Research and Innovation is a cross-cutting theme of Horizon 2020. The European Commission describes RRI as “an approach that, in regard to science, anticipates and assesses potential implications and societal expectations, with the aim to foster the design of inclusive and sustainable research and innovation”. The basic idea is simple and powerful: given science and innovation’s power to transform our world, we need to make sure that they work with and for society.

But what does this mean in practice? What does it mean for research and researchers? These are the questions that we are setting out to answer in our RRI Tools project, and that we will be discussing at the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators’ conference in Leiden, the Netherlands, later this month.