Responsible Innovation Toolkit

24 May

How can cutting edge research best serve the world responsibly?

For 9 months - a full academic year - we collaborated with the Public Engagement team at the University of Bristol to develop and deliver a series of creative workshops and events to help researchers of all disciplines, at all stages of their careers, think about their responsibility to humanity, the environment, the future, and themselves.

The ambition was to devise a collection of innovative and accessible exercises that researchers could adopt and share. Each workshop and each chapter in the resulting RRI Toolkit addressed a different element of that responsibility, including:

1. Responsibility to the Future: In the face of climate change and resource depletion on a crowded planet facing an uncertain future, every researcher is trying to make the world a better place.

2. Responsibility to the Environment: Research often relies upon a lot of input from the natural world, but what does it give back? If you had a plant or animal on your team what questions would they ask of the work you are doing?

3. Responsibilities to the Breadth of Humanity: The University research community is in some quarters overwhelmingly male, pale, and stale, but humanity is anything but. In order to spend public funds, research needs to address public needs.

4. Responsibility to Yourself and Others: It's no good for you and it's no good for your research if you work over-long hours in unpleasant conditions and make important decisions in stressful situations.

Our collaboration with the University of Bristol’s Public Engagement team took place from 2021 - 2022, with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research & Innovation programme.

The RRI Toolkit is available for anyone to use, for free. You can download it here.

Read more about our work with Responsible Research & Innovation here.