PRISMA has developed a practical guideline / roadmap for companies aiming to strengthen consideration of ethical, legal and social impacts aspects in their technology and product development. This roadmap provides guidelines to develop long-term strategies to innovate responsibly, integrating technical, ethical, social, environmental and economic issues into their research and innovation practices.
The recipients are the organisations and agents involved in planning and performing research and innovation and technological development. The focus is on transformative and enabling technologies.
The roadmap is structured on a set of acknowledged RRI principles, that are operationalized based on three key actions:
- Reflection and Anticipation.- Integrate analysis of ethical, legal and social impacts since the early stages of product development
- Inclusiveness.- Perform stakeholder engagement to inform all phases of product development
- Responsiveness.- Integrate monitoring, learning and adaptive mechanisms to address public and social values and normative principles in product development.
The design of the roadmap for implementing RRI in the industrial practice reflects a stepwise approach - consisting of 6 steps - that is synthetically represented in Figure 1.
The RRI roadmap designed through this process will set the pillars for a long-term strategy for R&I, indicating vision and specific actions to address the different issues and phases of responsible product development.
The approach has been tested in practice in eight pilot companies referring to industrial research projects related to transformative technologies: in particular nanotechnologies, biotechnologies, the Internet of Things and autonomous vehicles. This exercise helped to refine and deepen the different issues, steps and actions.
The outcomes have been translated into the guidelines that describe in detail the whole process and each of the steps leading to the roadmap design.
In addition, the project has developed a list of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) companies can use to formulate or to measure (intended) impact.
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