Responsible innovation

Innovating is about creating and transforming the future of society. However, to ensure a desirable future for humanity, innovation needs to be responsible. In this respect, there are frameworks such as the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) that guide all the societal actors involved in research and innovation (R&I) processes towards reflecting upon the consequences of their research for society.

In this sense, responsible innovation is “an approach that anticipates and assesses potential implications and societal expectations with regard to research and innovation, with the aim to foster the design of inclusive and sustainable research and innovation”(EC, 2019).

R&I processes conducted from the lens of RRI are guided by the principles or dimensions of inclusion, anticipation, reflection, responsiveness, and transparency. These five principles that define RRI provide a suitable framework for conducting research and innovating responsibly in any area of R&I, including social robots.

Main problem

However, one of the most challenging aspects of being able to put into practice these principles is HOW TO specifically implement them in everyday R&I practices.

What we do in this workshop

Lessons learned

• First, we will hear the experience from the participants: How do you implement the RRI goals in your research project?

Self-Coaching techniques

• Following the basic Coaching principle that finding the right answers is about asking the right questions, we provide a hands-on approach half-day workshop session in which participants will first learn a series of self-coaching techniques that can be used as self-guidance tools to lead R&I processes throughout all the stages, from the conception of the project to the final implementation or publication. These self-guidance tools that participants will learn and practice during the session have been designed by the organizers themselves.

Shared Guidelines

• Next, participants and organizers will together produce a series of guidelines for conducting responsible research and innovation in the area of social robots based on the learnt techniques. We expect that the guidelines will be useful not only to participants but to the whole R&I community that work with social robots for conducting responsible R&I.