Mapping RRI Dimensions and Sustainability into Regional Development Policies and Urban Planning Instruments

Citizens' Perceptions of Research and Innovation Dilemmas: Insights from a Large-Scale Survey in Four European Regions

This study presents a valuable dataset supporting regional research and innovation systems in four European regions: Vestland (Norway), Kriti (Greece), Galicia (Spain), and Overijssel (Netherlands). It focuses on understanding citizens' perceptions of research and innovation dilemmas within these regions. The dataset comprises 14 questions aligned with the Responsible Research and Innovation framework, evaluating stakeholders' techno-moral attitudes towards technological change and socio-economic outcomes. A survey conducted between April and July 2020 gathered responses from 7,729 individuals, ensuring broad age and gender representation. This dataset is highly valuable for regional policymaking and policymakers' engagement strategies, enhancing equity and effectiveness in addressing grand societal challenges. Research outcomes reveal citizens' aspirations for developmental trajectories prioritizing quality-of-life, renewable energy, and support for innovative SMEs in their regions. The study contributes to existing research by highlighting limited citizen trust and expectations of effective government actions in addressing societal challenges at the regional level.

Addressing responsibility in innovation processes for sustainability: Lessons for responsible management of sustainable innovation form a systematic literature review

Analyzing the impact of a sustainability agenda in research and innovation on system transition is a critical research topic. This literature stream aims to examine how research and innovation can deal with wicked-problems at a dynamic system level to create more sustainable future systems. However, this study addresses two main issues in the current sustainability transition literature. First, the literature to date offers little insight into concrete implications for the management of innovation processes at the organizational level. Second, sustainability is often addressed as per se desirable. While the concept of Sustainable Innovation (SI) can valuably contribute in addressing the first issue by providing essential features to analyze business management procedures and their broader implications on socio-technical systems, it falls short in addressing the second issue. Essential aspects of sustainability, such as the responsibility for potential future trade-offs through innovation, are not strategically integrated into the current framework. This study argues that without strategic integration of responsibility, there is a risk of contributing to a partially-sustainable-"irresponsible"-socio-technical system change as a result of business innovation activities. Therefore, an extended innovation process model for sustainability to embed responsibility at the core of innovation activities is required. For this purpose, the framework of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is utilized. This paper reports on findings from a systematic literature review of a representative sample of empirical studies from the SI and RRI literature. Thereby, the goal was to extend the understanding of management opportunities within innovation processes for sustainability through the implementation of RRI principles, in order to create sustainable socio-technical systems.

Women’s Empowerment, Research, and Management: Their Contribution to Social Sustainability

This article enhances some ideas and opinions related with the challenges that women across the world face nowadays to pursue a professional career. The route they take has frequent obstacles of a distinct nature, which are not always comparable with those faced by men. The starting point of this work is the conclusions of the workshop “Women empowerment and gender equality, responsible research and innovation”—Research Project “SOILdarity”. This workshop revealed a diversified view about the subject, evidencing its connection with the social sustainability, with a special focus on academia and research management. This document introduces the topic in the context of the workshop, revises key aspects of women’s empowerment in a society still dominated by men’s opinions and organization (gender balance, obstacles and strategies), highlights the situation of women in academia and in research management, and gives the authors’ opinions about some questions related to gender and equality. We conclude that all societal actors must acknowledge women as key actors in contributing to social sustainability, working together towards creating an environment where they can have leadership roles.