Impact Pathways for RRI Initiatives in Regional R&amp;I Ecosystems
Creators: name: Strand Roger
name: Slaattelid Rasmus
name: Völker Thomas
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: TRANSFORM is a coordination and support action funded under the SwafS-14 call topic of Horizon 2020 to help implement the principles and practices of RRI – Responsible Research and Innovation – into institutions, policies and practices of innovation at the regional scale. To this effect, the project involves itself in processes of innovation, policy-making and practice in three European regions: Lombardy, Catalonia and the Brussels-Capital region, our so-called “clusters”. The project initiatives include efforts to introduce RRI approaches into S3 policies in the three regions. The TRANSFORM project has developed and refined its own strategy for monitoring and evaluating the progress of its activities and approaches, in close collaboration with other SwafS-14 funded actions and the methodologically oriented RIA on the topic, SuperMoRRI. Especially in 2021 and 2022, the novel approach of "evaluative inquiry" has gained traction within the SwafS/RRI community. This deliverable, D7.5, is a scientific publication that represents and presents our use of the method of evaluative inquiry to assess pathways to impact and benefit of TRANSFORM activities. The publication is our manuscript for an original research article, "Transformative Translations? Challenges and tensions in territorial innovation governance", recently (October 2022) submitted to the journal NOvation – Critical Studies of Innovation, which is preparing a thematic issue entitled "Perspectives on innovation governance: challenges and dilemmas". The results were presented in a preliminary form at the annual -SPRI conference of the EU-SPRI Forum (the European Forum for Studies of Policies for Research and Innovation) in Utrecht, June 2022. The article has the following abstract: <em>Since the 1990s, the changing ways of producing and circulating knowledge have been accompanied by debates that diagnose and call for change in the relationship between science, society, politics, and innovation. Most recently in Europe, some of these debates emphasize the concept of responsible research and innovation (RRI). In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of different territorial RRI-pilots within the Horizon 2020-funded project TRANSFORM. In these pilots, different translations of RRI become visible. RRI (1) gets translated as participatory and deliberative modes of innovation governance aimed at transformative change, (2) takes the shape of citizen science projects; and (3) is enacted </em><em>as participatory agenda setting and (plans for a) citizen assembly. We argue that it is the often-invisible work of establishing, nurturing, and caring for relationships within the territorial R&amp;I ecosystems - what can the thought of as ongoing “maintenance work” - that creates the conditions for more responsive modes of innovation governance and thus a shift towards transformative change in innovation policy. Through describing these translations and the related practices we will direct attention to the potentials, challenges, and systemic barriers of this kind of work. </em> An important observation is that most of such work, which can be of critical importance to the success of RRI initiatives, is hardly visible if one tries to quantify or otherwise capture it by existing RRI indicators. Our study documents the presence of such work in all three regions of TRANSFORM and explains how the pilots in all three regions are on pathways to achieving impact and, from an RRI perspective, benefit for society. The choice in the Grant Agreement of making TRANSFORM Deliverable D7.5 a scientific publication that presents original research, has the advantage of increasing the dissemination level and potentially the impact of the results. The potential disadvantage is that scientific publications have a genre that can be hard to access for non-specialists. For this reason, we have decided to use the results to prepare a voluntary update of D7.3 into a Second Version. The new version will be produced during project month M36.