Sustainable innovation, learning and responsibility

Abstract

This paper takes as a starting point that it is a broad societal responsibility to stimulate the development and uptake of sustainable innovations. In order to pursue this societal responsibility, insights derived from systems’ approaches to sustainable innovation will be connected to reflections on responsibility. A core understanding of systems’ approaches is that actors from different institutional domains have to create a shared future orientation that directs innovation in a desirable way. This implies that boundaries between institutional domains have to be broken down, while these boundaries have been erected to hold individual actors accountable for their actions and decisions. The tension between these conflicting responsibility claims will be addressed here and described against the background of a number of societal developments that not only complicate the facilitation of sustainable innovation via the development of shared future visions, but also present new challenges for reflections on responsible innovation.