Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RRI2SCALE (Responsible Research and Innovation Ecosystems at Regional Scale for Intelligent Cities, Transport and Energy)
Reporting period: 2021-04-01 to 2022-12-31
EU territorial authorities are tasked with a significant, yet extremely challenging task: to develop and implement successful regional R&I policies that spearhead sustainable development and economic growth, while simultaneously advancing inclusiveness and quality of life (Regional Dilemma). RRI2SCALE has designed a robust methodological approach to assist regional R&I governance systems to effectively and sustainably address the Regional Dilemma. RRI2SCALE set from the identification of how RRI was integrated within four project regions [Hordaland (NO), Overijssel (NL), Kriti (GR) and Galicia (ES)], what the key constituting elements of territorial R&I ecosystems are, what citizens think of the way RRI and R&I ecosystems interact and what their suggestions for future improvements are. This insight was triangulated with future trends on smart and intelligent cities, transport and energy as key drivers for regional sustainable development and growth (identified via Delphi), that resulted in techno-moral scenarios depicting potential R&I trajectories and consequent impacts on policy, socioeconomic and environmental level. The scenarios were “tested” via JRC’s Scenario Exploration System and Regional Dialogues. Their outcomes formed the basis for the elaboration of Regional Agendas and Roadmaps that described the concrete steps to be taken towards the integration of RRI principles into territorial R&I design. All activities, outcomes and impacts were closely monitored by the RRI2SCALE Monitoring and Evaluation Framework, which included a set of customised indicators for mapping the impact pathways between regional innovation and RRI. All project results, together with a training compendium on how to perform the project activities, formed the RRI2SCALE Toolkit for replication by other territories.
WP1 'Setting the scene' explored in-depth the Regional Dilemma and the dynamic of each participating region’s governance system and mechanisms that cause disequilibrium between responsible and regional innovation, identified good practices of RRI integration in regional context that can be transferable in other regions, and explored the levels of citizens readiness level for stakeholder consultation in all four project regions.The key achievement in WP1 was the final version of Good Practice Compendium (D1.2) - good practices depicting RRI integration into territorial development. WP2 'Exploring the future' developed six techno-moral scenarios, two per thematic domain (i.e. intelligent cities, intelligent energy and intelligent transport). All scenarios depict potential Research & Innovation trajectories and their consequent impact on policy, socioeconomic and environmental levels and are thoroughly described in D2.2 "Techno-moral scenarios for territorial R&I futures in the domain of intelligent transport".WP2 advanced with the regional validation of the scenarios. A light online deliberation process took place. After the deliberation, the scenarios were updated, following an outlook toward delivering plausible, distinctive, complete and internally consistent scenarios. The updated scenarios are thoroughly described in D2.3 "Validation report on techno-moral scenarios". WP3 'Multi-stakehholder dialouges' supported the project regions to engage with their regional stakeholders with a view to enhance long-term collaboration on the topic of regional responsible innovation. The WP generated new knowledge by delivering and implementing a multistakeholder dialogue methodology and contributed to unlock rich knowledge and insights for responsible territorial RRI in the project regions. Deliverable 3.1. describes the methodology and guidelines for the implementation of regional stakeholder dialogues. Multistakeholder dialogues took place within each of the four regions, and the Cross-regional Dialogues were organised in all regions. The forecasting tool Scenario Exploration System (SES) tool was tailored, digitalised and localised for usage within the dialogues. Activities in Work Package 4 “Co-designing regional R&I Agendas and roadmaps/ Building the sustainability“ consisted of: (i) holding co-creation workshops at each pilot region in order to develop RRI-informed regional co-creation agendas and roadmaps, and (ii) developing a Guidebook as well as a Memorandum of Collaboration (MoC) in order to sustain and further disseminate the results achieved through the project. This WP's key results were Agendas and Roadmaps of the RRI2SCALE Regions’ co-creation process, a Report on the outcomes of the Stakeholders Validation of Agendas and Roadmaps containing practical practical insights into regional challenges in implementing RRI and Cross-regional Memorandum of Cooperation - a very important Deliverable, that provides the foundation for the collaboration in this area extending beyond the timeline of the project. In Work Package 5 “Monitoring, evaluation and assessment” a Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) framework was developed. This framework has been applied in monitoring of the RRI2SCALE activities and the collected data was delivered as the RRI2SCALE Indicators Database. The monitoring and evaluation in WP5 has been a co-development of such insights, perceptions and discourses that provide sustainability to the processes and institutional changes that have started with RRI2SCALE. In Work Package 6 “Stakeholder engagement, dissemination and exploitation” , the standard promotional package of the project was delivered and online presence of the project was ensured. Participation in external events and presentation of RRI2SCALE in EU-wide workshops, Conferences, and online webinars took place (27 external events in total). In total, the aggregated result of the stakeholder engagement, dissemination and communication actions was a total audience pool of more than 65.000 stakeholders. The overall exploitation and sustainability strategy of the project was created to track the development of promising exploitable results that can be used by partners after the end of the grant. WP6 also led two applications to the exploitation services of the Horizon Results Booster and a series of scientific academic papers were published by partners in high-rank journals.
The project contribiuted to the state of the art by examining the trade-offs and challenges in integrating the RRI approach with citizen perspectives in regional innovation landscapes to see citizens’ concerns regarding research and development activities. The RRI2SCALE’ impact could be categorized according to immediate, mid-term and long-term impacts. In terms of immediate impact, one year after the beginning of the project, the main goal was to understand the regional stakeholder ecosystems better and engage the regional quadruple helix stakeholders to develop a more sustainable R&I systems in their territories. On the mid-term level (approximately at the end of the project), the aim was to put the RRI2Scale responsible regional R&I systems in the position of a role model for other territories, and particularly other EU regions. Within the long-term level (8 years after the beginning of RRI2SCALE), the aim is to have consistently influenced the advancement of the six key RRI policy areas identified by the Commission: public engagement, gender equality, science education, open access, ethics and governance.