CORDIS

On the one hand, data shows that the majority of European citizens are not informed about the advances of Science and Technology. And it was shown that this situation affects the innovation performance at the national level. At the same time, experts agree on the fact that many societal challenges have not yet received enough attention from researchers, companies and government despite enormous potential for innovative solutions. On the other hand, Science Shops have been proposed to bridge the gap between Science and Society and to foster the design of inclusive and sustainable research and innovation projects in order to better respond to the “grand challenges” of our time. The Science Shops are intermediation structures that bring together civil society organizations (CSOs) and research institutions to encourage and foment scientific research that directly responds to societal concerns and needs expressed by citizens. Science Shops are based on a bottom-up approach and the concept of co-creation acknowledging that knowledges do not only reside within the communities of experts. Science Shops are powerful structures that connect different worlds and enable citizens to co-construct knowledge together with the scientific and innovation actors. InSPIRES will, during four years, invigorate Science Shops structures and projects and their cooperation among four continents through its eight international consortium partners, their respective networks, and its numerous experts participating in the international advisory board of the project. It represents a unique opportunity for bottom-up research and innovation, incorporating the views of civil actors to prioritize the research and innovation agendas. InSPIRES brings together practitioners and experts from across and beyond Europe to co-design, jointly pilot, implement and roll out innovative models for Science Shops. The InSPIRES models integrate Responsible Research and Innovation, Open Science and Impact Evaluation as part of their DNA in order to open the research process up in a more strategic way to civil society and other stakeholders. InSPIRES brings Science Cafés and other public engagement initiatives into its models together with a “glocal” international focus, for more inclusive, context relevant and culturally adapted community-based participatory research and innovation. InSPIRES outcomes will: a) give evidence and support political bodies and decision-makers, in order to propose changes in local, regional, national and international policies; b) nurture the debate about the place and role of society in science, c) support the development of new Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and Open Science (OSc) strategies and guidelines. The main goal of the 4-year InSPIRES project is to build effective cooperation between science and society by supporting the growth of Science Shops and enabling the expansion of responsible participatory research and innovation in Europe and abroad, in order to tackle key societal challenges that affect the world population.