Responsible Research and Innovation in Academic Practice

The development of today's societies is tightly entangled with scientific and technological developments. The concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is an answer to the question about responsibility – and the distribution of responsibility – for this process. The core aim is to better align research processes more with the values, concerns and desires of societal actors, therewith stressing the shared responsibility of science and society to sustainably produce future-oriented and relevant knowledge for shaping our common future.

As core institutions of our knowledge societies, universities play a crucial role for giving RRI a defined and tangible meaning; e.g. in integrating responsibility as a core value in research and teaching. RRI has become a central issue in policies and funding programmes (most notably in the European Union’s Horizon 2020). The research platform explores the potential of the much-debated concept for academic research practice at the University of Vienna.

The aim of the platform is to explore the conditions for responsibility in research and innovation (responsibility conditions) along different topics and in close interdisciplinary collaboration between social sciences and the life sciences.