Reflections on responsible research and innovation (RRI) and RRI training
I've spent the past year or so deepening my understanding of responsible research and innovation (often referred to as RRI) - a broadly encompassing framework that seeks to guide researchers and the wider research sector on how to produce innovative research that is socially responsible and conducted in society's interests. We understand that we need to innovate to tackle the many significant challenges we face, not least to address the UN’s sustainable development goals. But innovative research is not without risk; it can be socially transformative in both positive and negative ways, environmentally harmful, and it can exclude some from the benefits that innovation brings.
RRI aims to maximise the positive economic and social benefits of innovative research while foreseeing, mitigating and avoiding risks, and to make research more open, transparent and inclusive. It also emphasizes the need for researchers to engage societal stakeholders in the research process, to enable society to influence the direction of research to ensure that it is of benefit to society. A key goal of RRI is also to ensure publicly funded research creates value for money and value for society in ethical, and socially and environmentally responsible ways.
The question for researchers then is how do they integrate RRI into their project designs and proposals, teams, processes and outputs. There are a lot of RRI resources already out there; RRI tools is a one-stop shop for a whole range of different RRI resources. EPSRC’s AREA framework, and the tools that have been created to guide researchers through the AREA process (see ORBITs RRI resources, as an example), including the fantastic RRI prompts and practice cards from TAS, also support researchers through the reflective process that sits at the core of RRI. Training in RRI is vitally important too, not just for researchers, but for professional support staff and for staff working for funders as well.
For much of last year, I had the pleasure of working with EPSRC’s RRI leads, Dr Claire Cox and Dr Michelle Lascelles, and with James Parry at UKRIO and UKRIO trustee Dr Simon Kolstoe, on co-developing an RRI training programme for EPSRC staff. During the co-development process, we engaged with EPSRC’s thematic leads and heard about how they encounter RRI in their roles, and how the research communities they work with experience RRI on the ground. We also engaged with EPSRC portfolio managers to ensure that the training we devised could support EPSRC staff to inform and support the research communities they work with to consider RRI in their funding applications, and to integrate RRI into project plans, processes, operations and outputs.
We rolled out this training programme to a wide range of EPSRC staff over several months, from 2023-2024. Over the course of this training programme, we discussed the different challenges that RRI raises for research communities to address, and the different ways in which the AREA framework can be operationalised to help meet these challenges. We also discussed the benefits RRI offers too – not least conducting ethical and socially responsible innovative research in ways that are inclusive and environmentally sustainable. RRI encourages and promotes interdisciplinarity and knowledge exchange as well. At its core, it uses reflection and engagement to inform decisions and actions.
This might all sound new to you if you are new to RRI. The truth is, it isn’t. RRI provides us with a means by which to navigate across a whole host of research frameworks and agendas that you, and many others, might already be very familiar with: research ethics, research integrity, EDI, good research governance, open research, reproducibility… the list goes on.
If you’d like to know more, do please check back here in a few weeks’ time, when I hope to have put together a set of resources on RRI – those that have I’ve found to be easily accessible and useful for training and supporting the research community to explore RRI and deepen their understanding of it. And if you’d like to find out more about RRI training, for researchers, staff at research funders an/or for professional research support staff, do please get in touch.