We have discussed in more detail about CRS and RRI in Module 0.

To refresh your memory, please see Module 0.4.

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) shares the arena with other concepts, such as technology assessment, risk assessment, technology management, and sustainability management.

The biggest and possibly most powerful concept though is often overlooked: Corporate (social) Responsibility (CR). It could be thought that the word ‘corporate’ limits the application of CR principles and tools in RRI, because RRI deals with private and public investments. However, the three main corporate responsibilities -environmental, social and economic- are the same for publicly funded research and innovation (R&I) actors.

Though CR deals with the whole cycle of business life and not just the R&I stage, for a business to address effectively its corporate responsibilities it needs to focus on:

• Its business impacts: identifying the social and environmental impacts of its operations and assess their significance.
• The tools/policies to mitigate those impacts: adopting management standard to re-organize its activities and minimize those impacts.
• The stakeholders’ concerns: identifying the most important stakeholders, understanding and prioritizing their concerns, and developing a strategy to satisfactorily address them.

This is exactly what our roadmap is all about!