Celebrating the achievements of the £33M UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Programme

What is the Value of RRI?

Briefly…

Practicing Responsible Research and Innovation:

  • helps you – and other people – to understand why you are doing what you are doing,
  • helps to avoid problems before they happen,
  • helps to get the most value out of your time and research.

 

Many funders, research centres and networks also require that you explicitly address RRI in your research proposals, including:

 

Next: Getting Started with RRI

 

In more detail…

Practicing Responsible Research and Innovation typically includes:

  • Anticipating possible outcomes of research and innovation. This includes considering both intended and unintended outcomes, and can help you to think about why the work is worth doing, and also what might “go wrong” or cause problems in the future.
  • Reflecting on your (and others) motivations, processes and products. Even within a single research or innovation project we all face different and competing demands on our time and energy. By setting aside time to deliberately reflect we can help to ensure that we are still heading in a good direction and using our time well.
  • Engaging with relevant stakeholders. Eventually our work will affect other people, for example as users, consumers, patients or citizens. By involving a broad range of people early in the research and innovation process and allowing them to shape the research we can increase the chances that our work will be both useful and acceptable, and we may avoid a nasty surprise later on (such as a public outcry or newspaper scandal).
  • Acting accordingly to address issues revealed. RRI practices should make a real difference to what we do and how we do it.

 

For more information…

Marina Jirotka, Barbara Grimpe, Bernd Stahl, Grace Eden, and Mark Hartswood. 2017. Responsible research and innovation in the digital age. Commun. ACM 60, 5 (May 2017), 62–68. https://doi.org/10.1145/3064940
 

Paul Root Wolpe. 2006. Reasons Scientists Avoid Thinking about Ethics. Cell, Volume 125, Issue 6, 1023 – 1025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2006.06.001