From Technology Assessment to Responsible Innovation - Shaping Our Open Future | Professor Dr. Armin Grunwald
Technology Assessment (TA) is one of the key roots of Responsible Innovation (RI). So, what is TA and how can we use it to improve our innovation success?
FULL Episode 2: Shaping Our Open Future
Armin Grunwald is a Full Professor of Philosophy at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. There, he is also the Director of KIT's Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis at KIT (ITAS). Since 2002, Armin has been serving as the Director of the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag.
Armin's professional background includes technology assessment, ethics of philosophy, theory of sustainable development, and the epistemology of inter-and transdisciplinary research. In his professional work, Armin is a member of several advisory commissions and committees in various fields of technological advance. In his research work, he is developing a theory of technology assessment in conjunction with applications in the fields of the transformation of the energy system, the ongoing digitalization and new and emerging technologies such as synthetic biology and human enhancement.
Armin is an author and editor of multiple professional and research publications, among them “Technology Assessment in Practice and Theory” (Routledge 2019) and “The Hermeneutic Side of Responsible Research and Innovation” (Wiley 2016).
Topics covered:
Conversation highlights:
“This really often is a challenge: to really clarify the issue. And this must be clarified not only from an economic point of view but also from looking at the environment where the innovation shall be put into.”
What is Technology Assessment (TA)?
TA originated in the USA about 50 years ago in the realm of the US Congress as an instrument for the parliament to use scientific knowledge to improve policy decisions.
“…it's about the influence of technology, and later on also of innovation, to all of the fields of policy making.… all these policy fields were increasingly influenced by new technology and…it was necessary to get knowledge of expected or feared or plausible or possible consequences of those new technologies as early as possible in order to take them into account into decision making.”
From the USA, TA then spread to Europe during the 1980s and 1990s.
Three events that grounded Technology Assessment in Germany
1) Nuclear power waste management:
When nuclear power technology was first introduced into Germany, the management of nuclear power waste at its later lifecycle was not taken into account. This exclusion resulted in violent protests throughout the 1980s and 1990s and continues to this day.
“And this was a basic push to technology assessment because in TA we try to think through all the life cycles of new technology, not only to look at the benefits earned at the beginning, in the phase of operation but also to look beyond and to take care of what will happen with that technology, with the waste, after the phase of having used it. And so this was a….very basic push at the beginning.”
2) Stuttgart 21:
Stuttgart 21 was an infrastructure project for introducing an underground train network in Stuttgart, Germany. Public feedback was encouraged but protests ensued when the project began. As a result, project Stuttgart 21 was delayed for several years.
“And that was a signal that technology assessment must be done, and in particular, in co-operation with citizens, with stakeholders, with people affected and so on. So not just as an expert oriented TA but together with those people who have to live with the new conditions.”
3) Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs):
Debates regarding GMOs such as areas of human stem cell research, technologies related to beginning and the end of life broadened the definition of what it means to do good technology. These considerations included not only whether GMOs would be safe for humanity, but also, about their broader socio-cultural impacts such as ethics and the meaning of life:
“And it was clear that technology assessment was needed also in this ethical respect.”
Technology Assessment (TA) vs Responsible Innovation (RI)?
Responsible Innovation (RI), like Technology Assessment (TA), also originated in the USA. Many elements of RI were developed from TA. One example is Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA), which originated in the Netherlands in the 1990s. CTA was a new form of TA and can be seen as the predecessor of RI because CTA was not designed for parliaments or ministries but for aiding the design and development process of technology.
RI then widened the range of:
1) subjects considered from “technologies” to “innovations”, and;
2) addressees to be included in this collaborative, co-innovation process
“It was…as far as I know…in the context of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) started by Bill Clinton and Al Gore more than 20 years ago. So, there was part of the budget dedicated to ethical research… There was a Center for Responsible Nanotechnology at that time and from the United States…it was taken up by the European Commission which coined this term of Responsible Research and Innovation.”
Responsible Innovation vs Marketing research – what’s the difference?
Both RI and Marketing are about understanding customers – their needs, values, actions and pain points. So, is RI just an extension of marketing?
Professor Grunwald says RI is more.
“…marketing research is just asking people, making surveys. It is about getting some ideas from observing lifestyle patterns, developments.” RI, on the other hand “attempts to accept not only consumers but also citizens and other people affected (by the innovation) on an equal footing… The roles are different. With market research the consumers are the consumers. In RRI, the consumers are the partners.”
The answer to this question varies case by case but in general: the stage of industry-lifecycle, purpose and addressees of marketing and RI are different.
A marketing department can be found in organisations across all stages of an industry’s lifecycle. The main purpose of marketing in most companies is about influencing consumer behaviour i.e. to gather and use customer-related information in a way that will (hopefully) convert into sales. Insights may be used to improve marketing communications and prioritise product/service features. On a day-to-day basis most marketing activities, apart from perhaps corporate branding, is about meeting short-term financial targets.
The purpose of responsible innovation is about increasing a disruptive/emerging innovation’s potential for achieving social and commercial success - two aspects that must go hand-in-hand. RI does this by helping innovators navigate difficult decisions. These decisions are “difficult” because individuals are forging new industries that do not have any/enough precedents, data, laws and regulatory frameworks to help guide daily decisions. Because disruptive innovations (unlike, say, a soft drink) can change who we are and how society functions, RI stakeholder engagement involves broader groups e.g. customers as well as (where possible/relevant) regulators, policy-makers, researchers, citizens etc.
It is important to state that RI is a broad discipline and the above are just some differences to help put RI into context in a business setting.
How to form a Responsible Innovation team. (Hint : define the problem first!)
Ethics has always been discussed as part of innovation but it alone is not enough.
“(An ethicist) might be okay in some very specific cases in, let me say, biotech or life science or whatever but in most cases …Responsible Innovation…is more of an interdisciplinary issue….Often it needs ethics, but it also needs an idea about the market, about governance structures, about the involvement of citizens, about participation, about how to organize some dialogue.”
Instead, Professor Grunwald encourages businesses to work with a RI institute to:
Focus on understanding and clarifying the right problem;
Develop a strategy to address that problem, then;
Gather the right experts to solve that problem/execute that strategy
“So, I always put it in this way: to get the problem and the challenge clear first and then to look for the approach, for methods, for persons, for disciplines and so on. This really often is a challenge: to really clarify the issue. And this must be clarified not only from an economic point of view but also from looking at the environment where the innovation shall be put into.”
Qualitative insights essential for innovation success
The more complex an innovation is, the more we need to rely on qualitative insights to better understand human behaviour and its impact on innovation outcomes (and vice versa).
However in 2019, while USD80 billion was spent on market research worldwide, only 20% was spent on qualitative research. This imbalance has remained steady over the last decade and is due to several practical challenges including time constraints, high costs of conducting qualitative research, and difficulties in recruiting suitable candidates. Should we overcome these challenges?
“We have to do quantitative work where possible. But there is one issue: we are talking about the future today, yes? And I guess we don't have any data from the future…Big data….is fine to understand systems, to look for sensitivities, dependencies and so on. But extending this knowledge to the future is a difficult issue. It is, in epistemology, highly precarious. And we all know about the many experiences where predictions failed. Completely failed.”
Qualitative insights are essential for innovation success because the more complex an innovation, the more we need to understand human behaviour and how it impacts innovation outcomes and vice versa. Armed with this deeper understanding, businesses can then better prepare for and respond to risk and shape opportunities when they arise.
Professor Grunwald on the vulnerabilities of our modern societies: “There is no Plan-B”
Based on over 3 decades of TA/RI leadership experience, Professor Grunwald alerts us of two major blind spots:
First is an issue close to his home: the need to create a more transparent and collaborative process to manage nuclear power waste in Germany.
Second is an issue facing global citizens and leaders: the increasing vulnerabilities of our modern societies due to our reliance on technology.
“We did a study…for the German Bundestag about 10 years ago about the vulnerability of the German electricity supply and possible consequences of a blackout. And this was a devastating result we got. And today I look at the field of digitalization…. One example is…if we were to abolish the possibility of paying by cash... In case…the internet would break down ….then nobody would be able to buy anything…I'm afraid that we are running into many many deep vulnerabilities…And my concern is that there is no Plan B.”
For more information on Armin you can head to www.itas.kit.edu/english/staff_grunwald_armin.php. To watch this full interview, you can head to “From Technology Assessment to Responsible Innovation - Shaping Our Open Future”.
