Responsible & Sustainable Innovation - Introduction to a new concept

Within the Erasmus+ project RRIL, the empirical studies on the degree of implementation of RRI in universities Finland, Poland and Spain showed that a) RRI has a low implementation degree in all three countries as a concept. But in all three countries, the basic principles of RRI as public engagement, gender equality, science education, open access, and ethics are present in the public discourse on science and are in different degree integrated in the structures and processes of the university as such. However, their integration in the concrete research and innovation activities is still a gap. b) RRI has not become a general guiding vision of university policies. In the recent years, the main guiding vision has become the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) similar as for the European Union and its member states. As the basic principles of RRI as also present in the SDGs, the decision was taken to integrate both in one concept called Responsible & Sustainable Innovation. Similar to RRI also the SDGs runs the risk to be only present in the official discourses without an effective integration in the research and innovation practice and to become a buzzword as so much others. Considering the big sustainable challenges which the humanity is facing actually, our project sustains that sustainability must be the reference point of all responsible innovation activities. To contribute to the anchorage of responsibility and sustainability in innovation based on scientific research, RRIL has developed and offers a training programme for Responsible & Sustainable Innovation for researchers, technicians of local authorities and university staff. It is expected that the training programme will support the orientation of university processes to the SDGs and to responsible innovation. In this article we will not present the learning programme, but the basics of the concept of Responsible & Sustainable Innovation (ReSI).