RRI for New Proposals

Briefly…

It is important to start considering Responsible Research and Innovation as early as possible in the process of developing a new project proposal. Many important decisions are made by the time the project is actually approved/funded.

Many funders also expect or require some elements of RRI to be evidenced in the proposal (for example, Patient and Public Involvement for medical projects). You should check for specific guidance or requirements related to the funder or funding call.

We have found it useful to:

Dedicate some time to anticipating potentially significant RRI issues early in the process.
Engaging with a range of people in those discussions, ideally including different kinds of stakeholders.
Explicitly include RRI activities and practices in the project plan.
Identify at least one team member to specifically champion RRI, to make sure it doesn’t get overlooked when things get busy.

There are some more suggestions on how to do this below.

Next: About the Horizon/TAS RRI Projects

In more detail…

Anticipating Potential Challenges

We have found that discussing this subset of questions based on the AREA-Plus framework is a good way to start thinking about RRI issues when developing a new project proposal:

Purpose: Why should this research be undertaken? Is the research controversial? Or disruptive? (5-10 minutes)
People: Who is affected? How? Who actually benefits? Or is harmed? Who is indirectly affected? Are the right stakeholders involved? (10-15 minutes)
Product: What might be the potential uses of what we create? Including unintended uses or consequences? Are there significant environmental impacts? (10-15 minutes)
Process: Are there any obvious research ethics concerns? Practically, how will we engage a wide group of stakeholders? How will we make time to reflect and replan during the project? (10-15 minutes)
Act: Document the key insights from the discussion and start to plan specific ways to address them in your project.

We suggest that you set aside about 1 hour to do this as a proposal team. Ideally including other stakeholders, or repeat the exercise with them.

RRI Action Plans

An RRI Action Plan is just a clear statement of what you are going to “do” in terms of RRI and why. An exercise like the one above can help to identify project priorities for RRI.
It is important to make the plan concrete, e.g. dedicating time and resources to specific activities that will address your RRI priorities.

The RRI Prompts and Practice cards – and many other RRI tools and resources – may help you to identify and plan RRI-related activities.

Addressing RRI in Proposals

Some funders or schemes may require that aspects of RRI are addressed specifically in the proposal.

This is the prompt used in the 2022 TAS Agile projects call, which you may find useful to consider:

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) aims to maximise the value of research by considering factors including its ethical acceptability, societal desirability and sustainability. RRI activities typically include ongoing Anticipation, Reflection, Engagement and Action, across all aspects of the research, including Purpose, Product, Process and People. Please briefly describe the main RRI issues relevant to your project, your plans to address them (including specific plans for stakeholder involvement) and the support you would like from Horizon or the University to do so. (200 words max.)

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) has a clearer statutory basis than RRI and may need to be addressed specifically. For example (again from the TAS Hub):

Please outline any potential EDI considerations that might arise from your research project, and how you plan to mitigate the impacts (200 words max).

For more information…

Virginia Portillo, Peter Craigon, Liz Dowthwaite, Chris Greenhalgh, Elvira Pérez-Vallejos (2022). Supporting responsible research and innovation within a university-based digital research programme: Reflections from the “hoRRIzon” project. Journal of Responsible Technology, Volume 12, 100045, ISSN 2666-6596. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrt.2022.100045