Business, Innovation and Responsibility

Introduction

The term “innovation”, one of the key concepts of the modern economy, is rarely found in conjunction with the term “responsibility”. Economic or sociological theories of innovation aim to understand its dynamics and determining factors in order to influence actors in their decisions and to develop public policies to encourage innovation. However, in most cases, these research projects leave no place for normative reflections; innovation is rarely considered in terms of its effects on natural resources, the environment, health and social structures; moreover, the ethical meaning of innovation and the world visions that it promotes or invalidates are seldom thought through. Even in the realm of philosophy, innovation is merely a secondary object of study [MEN 11]. Work on ethics, applied to science and technology, has responded to some of the normative questions relating to innovation, for example ethics for biotechnologies, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), medical ethics, security, geoengineering and synthetic biology. However, there is no “philosophy of innovation” as such, devoted specifically to the problems raised by a complex, interdisciplinary phenomenon, which combines technological and scientific development with economic constraints and determinants, social and political expectations and a normative element.

The emergence of the notion of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in Europe in early 2010 marked a conceptual turning point ...