Responsible innovation in the US, UK and Denmark: Governance landscapes

Abstract

This chapter explores the notion of responsible innovation (RI) as it is currently being imagined in policy and governance practice. It does this in the context of three different countries: The UK, US and Denmark. We ask how RI is being constituted within policy discussion. What is it understood as being? What kinds of actors are implicated in it? And what is its scope, or field of action? In exploring these questions we argue that responsible innovation is currently a largely international discourse, and that it remains unclear, from current policy discussion, how it should be put into practice. Though it is tied to a linear model of science and technology, in which both the process and outputs of scientific research are, through RI, imbued with responsibility, the actors involved and the fields in which they are assumed to operate are exceedingly general. As such, RI appears to be a fundamentally de-individualised process.