Knowledge bases and responsibility within regional innovation systems: reflections from the Twente region

Abstract

Increasing public investments in distributed platform infrastructures created new opportunities for economic growth and social welfare but simultaneously were associated with growing societal distrust in science’s power to solve societal problems. The concept of Responsible Research and Innovation was advanced as providing mechanisms to recouple science and society ensuring that research and innovation continues to uphold its societal duties. In this paper, we explore the extent to which it is possible to identify repertoires of responsible innovation behaviour within extant regional research and innovation networks through the way that these innovation networks draw on informal regional innovation resources. We distinguish two kinds of regional innovation network, those based on primarily synthetic knowledge bases, and those based on primarily analytic knowledge bases, in the eHealth sector where there are substantive societal concerns regarding responsibility and innovation. We contend it appears that the coupling of patients to innovation networks through their prior association with innovators (e.g. as patients) affects the scope for responsibility. We therefore contend that more attention is required for understanding the dynamics of citizen-innovator coupling in regional innovation networks if responsibility is to become a more common systemic property.