New technologies like nanotechnology, synthetic biology, internet of things, robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous vehicles have an increasing impact on our everyday life, our society, and the environment. This means that companies have to innovate responsibly and to include societal values – such as privacy, safety, sustainability, fair distribution of risks and benefits, safety or inclusiveness – in the development strategy of innovative products. This is known as ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ (RRI).
The main objectives of PRISMA were:
1. Integration of Responsible Research & Innovation (RRI) in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policies of 8 companies;
2. Providing evidence on how the RRI approach and attention for the gender dimension can improve the innovation process and its outcomes;
3. The development and testing of a roadmap that helps industries to implement RRI in their innovation processes as part of their CSR policy in order to deal with uncertain and sometimes partly unknown risks and public and ethical concerns of transformative technologies;
4. Broad uptake of this roadmap by companies through, industry associations, CSR and branch organizations as well as governments and CSOs.
The PRISMA project has conducted pilot studies with eight companies in order to help them to better integrate RRI in their innovation process and business practices and to align this with their CSR-polices. In addition, consultations took place with a wide range of other stakeholders from research, industry, policy makers, civil society organizations and standardization bodies.These has resulted in good practices on RRI and a systematic way to implement it (roadmap/pre-standard).
Jointly with companies, the EU-funded project PRISMA has developed a new methodology (‘RRI Roadmap’), a set of RRI-Key Performance Indicators, a toolkit and an online professional education course for the implementation of RRI by industry. The methodology is aligned with existing standards and policies on risk and innovation management, and corporate social responsibility (CSR).
The six-steps methodology (figure) to design the RRI Roadmap is based on a set of acknowledged RRI principles:
• Reflection and anticipation: analysis of ethical, legal and social impacts
• Inclusiveness: stakeholder engagement
• Responsiveness: monitoring, learning and adaptive mechanisms to address societal values
