Putting Responsibility Centre-Stage: The Case Of Responsible Stagnation

While Responsible Innovation (RI) is usually positioned as the antithesis of irresponsible innovation, a recent move has been to expolre Responsible Stagnation (RS) as alternative or complement to RI (de Saille & Medvecky, 2016).
Our paper draws on RS as a counterpoint to RI as we thing through what we mean by responsibility in this space and what underlying values we hold.
RS challenges the traditional rhetoric around the inherent value innovation, though maintains a commitment to responsibility in our science, technology, and innovation (STI) endeavours. In many ways, RS places responsibility centre-stage. And just as RI concieves of responsibility in terms of anticipatory, reflective, inclusively deliberative, and responsive (Owen et al., 2013), RS brings with it its own set of concepts and meanings. We begin this paper by considering what the concept of ‘responsibility’ means or looks like in RS?
RS suggests that Innovation is not always or necessarily an unquestionable good, and by doing so invites us to revisit the values we espouse when pursuing our STI endeavours. But RS is not value neutral, and espouse some of its own values, So the second part of our paper asks: what are the underlying values of RS and how are they envisaged in the framework of RS?

de Saille, S., & Medvecky, F. (2016). Innovation for a steady state: a case for responsible stagnation. Economy and Society, 45(1), 1-23.
Owen, R., Stilgoe, J., Macnaghten, P., Gorman, M., Fisher, E., & Guston, D. (2013). A framework for responsible innovation. Responsible innovation: managing the responsible emergence of science and innovation in society, 27-50.