RRI legacies: co-creation for responsible, equitable and fair innovation in Horizon Europe

Abstract

International audience The H2020 framework programme has been a key driver and catalyst of Responsible Research and Innovation, in Europe and beyond. We argue that the new framework programme, Horizon Europe, shifts the focus away from the research and knowledge production emphasis of H2020 to innovation, placing new requirements on RRI and the RRI community. The "new policy experiment" of Missions and Open Innovation 2.0 can and should be seen an opportunity to leverage the insights gained from the past decade of activities in RRI and to extend and improve, particularly with regards to fair and equitable co-creation activities. With the increase focus on innovation, novel and responsible ways of innovating and co-creating must be embedded in these activities to reinforce the link between science, innovation and society. In this perspective, we argue that co-creation can act as a linking-pin between the open science emphasis of H2020 and the open innovation accent of Horizon Europe. Paper Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is a democratization process leading to connecting science to the values and interests of European citizens by mean of participatory processes (Mazzonetto and Simone 2018). In Europe, RRI is exemplified by what has been described as "the Responsible Research and Innovation policy experiment" 1 in the European Commission, embodied by, but not exclusive to, the Science With and For Society programme (SwafS) in the Horizon2020 framework programme (European Commission, 2020). With activities spanning almost 8 years, this RRI policy experiment has led to RRI being embedded and integrated in a wide variety of projects, programmes and other activities based on six keys and a number of process requirements, 2 becoming an invoked and needed approach for properly governing potential controversial innovative technologies (i.e. genome editing, AI, 1 Van Oudheusden and Shelley-Egan (2020) Call for proposals: Special Issue: RRI Futures-Learning from a decade of Responsible Research and Innovation. ...