1 Introduction

European and national research and innovation (R & I) policies are increasingly oriented towards the task to tackle the unprecedented challenges reflected especially in the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the Agenda 2030 that societies face today. Following the need to produce adequate and viable solutions with a strong societal impact and aware of the fact that this impact will strongly affect and depend on the lifestyles, values and attitudes of citizens, there has been a rising attention for the need to better root science, research and innovation in society.

The challenge- or mission-oriented R & I approaches of the recent framework programmes (FP) launched by the European Commission paired with the programme lines of Science in Society (SiS) (FP7) and Science with and for Society (SwafS) (FP8 – Horizon 2020) reflect the rising attention to the science and society nexus, that is underpinned by Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). The European Commission launched projects within FP8, such as the NewHoRRIzon project, to diagnose and analyse the implementation of RRI in R & I projects that have been funded by the Horizon 2020 framework programme and to experiment on ways to foster its uptake. One question of major concern has been how RRI can best develop its potential to establish the commitment and cooperation of the various actors in the R & I system in order to meet the new European challenge or mission-oriented R & I approach and at the same time contribute to the support of responsibility in R & I. This article highlights national funding and innovation agencies in this respect.

National funding and innovation agencies play an important role as pacesetters and enablers for R & I to independently address societal challenges and to implement new concepts in the R & I landscape and policy agenda. Rooted both in the national R & I systems as well as in the international exchange and European experience within EU Framework programmes and the ERA, agencies mediate between politics and the respective national R & I landscape: As contracting parties to the political authorities, the direction of action they take is mainly driven by the political entities they report to. Within this framework, funding and innovation agencies have a considerable amount of flexibility to define their own strategies in cooperation with their political partners. Translating policy into R & I programmes they can build on a profound experience in shaping R & I with the respective R & I communities. While there are similarities as far as their mediating role is concerned, they differ widely in their outlook, scope, size and budget, as well as in their mission, mandate and public accountability towards the state (Glennie and Bound 2016).

As far as the implementation of RRI is concerned, funding and innovation agencies take a crucial role within the research systems. Experimentation with different instruments in the funding and innovation landscape is necessary. New types of research and innovation funding and financing are needed that create incentives for funding grantees to responsibly foster innovation and research. There are some frontrunners that take RRI into R & I practice, such as the Responsible Innovation programme by the Dutch research council (NWO), the Research for innovation and sustainability Strategy of the Research Council of Norway (RCN) and the Framework for Responsible Innovation by the British Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (Owen 2014). Other funding and innovation agencies attentively consider whether, how and why RRI could benefit their work beyond the concepts and standards they already use and how it could be operationalized to be integrated into the agencies’ day-to-day practices? These questions are addressed in more punctuated activities mainly of a lab-character within agencies to test and foster innovative approaches.

In this article the authors highlight the activities of two funding and one innovation agencies, looking at the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), the Austrian Promotion Agency (FFG) and the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (TA CR) from an inside perspective. They consider how these funding and innovation agencies are already responding to the challenge-oriented R & I approach, how their activities can be linked to RRI and what additional insights could be gained from introducing RRI to agency practitioners.

This paper contributes an agency practitioners’ perspective to the scientific discussion on implementing RRI, reporting on de facto RRI already practiced in the respective agencies as well as on the experience in experimenting with RRI on the workshop-level within the funding and innovation agencies, discussing the insights gained from the experience as well as potential benefits and obstacles, and finally formulating results and recommendations on the action needed to really open up the potential benefits of RRI to national funding and innovation agencies in their specific national R & I landscape.

2 The Wider Context: Challenges to the National R & I Landscape

The research and innovation landscape has changed significantly in recent years, resulting in new concepts and mission statements that help to address how science and technology can contribute to both the environment and society we want for future generations. For years, public funded R & I systems have been characterised by the adaptation to new circumstances and increased performance – in terms of jobs, growth and competitiveness. More recently, traditional thinking in R & I systems is being challenged, mainly because it does not give sufficient weight and attention to the fulfilment of societal needs through innovation (Geels 2004).

Established R & I systems are currently confronted with new challenges and interrelated problem constellations, which are intensified by the ambition to deliver desirable high-quality results for society. Within the R & I landscape such problem constellations become evident in particular through newly emerging and developing socio-technical systems, through the impact of innovations, through large-scale societal challenges (digitalisation, sustainability, climate change etc.), as well as through the perceived societal desirability of R & I. Socio-technical systems manifest themselves through a multitude of actors, technological artefacts, infrastructures, legislative elements and the numerous interdependencies between them. The fulfilment of societal functions becomes central when engaging with socio-technical systems, which means that it is not only about technological innovation, but also about its use and introduction into society (Geels 2004). With regard to the impact of research and innovation, there is a growing demand not only to consider the intended and unintended consequences of innovation, but also to include the consideration of purposes and motivations, the sense of why one does it, who benefits from it and who does not (Owen et al. 2012). There is also the need to guarantee the quality of science: Societal expectations of the quality of science are high, so the question arises concerning what needs to be done to ensure that science produces comprehensible, effective and verifiable results that meet the challenges of our contemporary society. The perceived societal desirability of R & I refers in particular to society’s expectations of research and innovation activities, because especially the access to knowledge in our Western society enables large parts of society to critically question and assess ongoing research and innovation activities (Lindner et al. 2016, p. 5). Indeed, there is a high demand to discuss the desirability of certain sensitive and societally relevant areas of applied R & I – e.g. genetically modified organisms, artificial intelligence or thermonuclear research.

R & I activities with the potential to address todays’ large-scale societal challenges will only have a chance to success if they assure the inclusion of a broad range of stakeholders from science, industry, public administration and civil society.Footnote 1 Todays’ R & I challenges should therefore be understood as fundamentally political in the sense of calling for the renegotiation of diverging interests, needs, concerns and even ethical values (Schroth et al. 2018). Given the large number of actors, institutions and relationships among them that need to be mobilised to address today’s R & I challenges and problem constellations mentioned above, Daimer et al. state: “From the point of view of innovation policy, it seems obvious that challenge oriented innovation requires different types of supporting instruments and therefore narrow types of demand articulation no longer seem adequate” (Daimer et al. 2012, p. 223). This understanding calls for a new type of research and innovation projects and funding programmes and requires an understanding of how the current R & I system, its actors and the research and innovation it contains could support the overall system and benefit society.

Both national governments and the European Union (EU) have already responded to the challenges of the R & I system by giving R & I policy a new direction over the past few years. The mere promotion for the purpose of economic growth has been replaced by an R & I policy that aims to address major societal challenges as well as environmental issues addressed by a challenge-driven, mission-oriented policy approach (Daimer et al.). The European Research funding programme considered SwafS in FP7 and fostered answers to societal challenges such as climate action, energy, health or food in the third pillar of the European Framework Programme Horizon 2020 (Horizon 2020). Horizon Europe, the new EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation for the period 2021–2027, aims, among other things, to guide the far-reaching impact of R & I on society, the environment and the economy through a mission-oriented policy approach. According to the European Research Area and Innovation Committee (ERAC), it is particularly important in the future to pay special attention to the principles of inclusivity, relevance, effectiveness and visibility in the European Research Area (ERA).

The inclusion of RRI as the key approach of SwafS and as a cross-cutting issue along all programme lines in Horizon 2020 had been a direct answer to make the European framework programme Horizon 2020 adept at facing societal challenges.

Conceptualisations of RRI and de facto RRI

Within scientific discourse and policy framing, there are several conceptualizations of RRI. The most prominent are the six RRI keys defined by the EU (European Commission 2014), comprising ethics, science education, gender equality, open access, governance and public engagement. Beyond these RRI keys, there are also the procedural heuristic of anticipation, inclusion, reflexivity and responsiveness, known as the four RRI process dimensions (Stilgoe et al. 2013; Owen et al. 2013). The framing of RRI in this paper is provided by the European Commission’s eighth framework programme: “Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) implies that societal actors (researchers, citizens, policy makers, business, third sector organisations, etc.) work together during the whole research and innovation process in order to better align both the process and its outcomes with the values, needs and expectations of society” (European Commission 2015). Fostering a shared responsibility and ownership between science, politics, industry and society as well as stimulating the cooperation of different social, academic, political and industrial actors, this framing of RRI would not only respond to societal needs but also create an “innovation-friendly climate” (Felt et al. 2018, p. 49). In recent years more efforts have been devoted to investigate what adopting RRI entails for research funding and research conducting organisations (Forsberg et al. 2018), as indeed RRI calls for a multi-disciplinary multi-level multi-stakeholder approach towards science, research and innovation. Due to their specific area of operation, this framing of RRI is most interesting for the participating agencies because its applicability clearly extends beyond science into research and innovation (Novitzky et al. 2020). In this paper, our reasoning hence revolves mostly around questions of how to introduce this reasoning into the agencies internal discourse and how to practically implement it in the context of challenge-oriented research and innovation.

A broader understanding of RRI applies only in the sections that present the current and ongoing activities of the agencies FFG, RVO and TA CR that can be classified as RRI or show distinct features of RRI. Here RRI encompasses diverse framings such as the six RRI keys, the four RRI process dimensions, responsibility in research and innovation but also activities that at least show some of the distinct features of the multi-disciplinary multi-level multi-stakeholder approach that is promoted by the EC via its SwafS programme. In this context also the term de facto RRI (Randels et al. 2016) often applies. Given the framework in which national agencies are operating and their individual size, scope and responsibilities, they respond to societal challenges of R & I at their pace and with their specific orientation. In this process, de facto RRI activities already underway in the agencies can be identified. Randles et al. (2016) use the term de facto together with RRI in case studies to understand how actors themselves embed de facto responsibility in research and innovation contexts, as well as in organisational settings and professional practice (Randles et al. 2016, p. 32). Since RRI is rather new and not yet fully established, the term RRI is still used rather rarely and there are no explicit references to it within the respective agency programmes or activities. However, there are many practices within the agencies, some of which have a long tradition (e.g. gender, involvement of stakeholders), that can be connected to RRI.

3 Methodology

The experiences and reflections presented in this article are mainly resulting from the joint work of the national funding and innovation agencies and the day-to-day work within the respective agency contexts. The three participating funding and innovation agencies – the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), and Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (TA CR) – have been part of the NewHoRRIzon project. Within that project the participating funding and innovation agencies formed the RRI-Network together with further partners, such as the Archimedes Foundation in Estonia and the Federation of German Scientists bringing in experiences of societal inclusion in R & I from the perspective of a civil society organisation. The RRI-Network engaged in the task to open up to concept to the agencies involved, while they differ widely by scope and objective: RVO supports entrepreneurs, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), knowledge institutes and organisations. The agency aims to facilitate entrepreneurship, improve collaborations, strengthen positions and help realise national and international ambitions with funding, networking, know-how and compliance with laws and regulations. FFG is the national funding agency for industrial research and development in Austria. FFG funding schemes play an important role in generating new knowledge, developing new products and services, and enhancing competitiveness in the global marketplace. They make it easier, or possible, to finance research and innovation projects, and help to absorb the risks involved in research. The FFG supports international networking and encourages careers in science. TA CR is a national funding body on the level of an organisational unit of the state which focuses on support of research, experimental development and innovation. It prepares and realizes its own funding programmes and secures them for other governmental departments. It also provides communication support between research organizations and the private sector. Representatives of the three agencies embarked on experimenting with RRI within their organisations. As agency practitioners,

  1. 1.

    they collected information from within their organisation on RRI-relevant or RRI-like practices: Given the framework in which national agencies are operating and their individual size, scope and responsibilities, they respond to the exigencies of challenge-oriented R & I policy approaches and the demand of responsible R & I at their pace and with their specific orientation. It was to see how the agencies represented here support RRI with different incentives for grantees or specific programmes, without using the term RRI. Accordingly, the focus was on practices within the agencies, that can be connected to the concept of the 6 keys of RRI, and on criteria and processes inspired by RRI that could be identified in funding guidelines.

  2. 2.

    they initiated and implemented workshops with other agency staff as small-scale experiments: Two agencies, namely FFG and RVO, have set up a roadmap for RRI-workshops in the respective agencies to promote an understanding of RRI and to identify opportunities for its implementation. At RVO, a workshop on RRI took place on April 11, 2019. Participants were, in addition to the two moderators – one from RVO and one from the University of Amsterdam – 7 female and 3 male employees at RVO who work on different themes such as: international CSR, internal strategy (Agenda2022), regulations for building/industry, innovation in energy sector, mission-driven research and innovation policy, SDGs. At FFG, a similar Workshop was set up with in total 15 employees (8 male and 7 female) participating in the workshop on May 2nd, 2019 in Vienna, Austria. Of these 15 participants, 4 were mid-level management, 1 a strategist, 3 European level experts (NCPs for H2020) and 7 national level innovation funding experts tasked with bottom-up funding or structural funding. The exchange with the participants was crucial to gain insights into their experience on the added value of RRI to their standard practices.

  3. 3.

    they experienced the practice of introducing RRI to their institution: This experience is of course closely linked to standing practices (in which they are involved on a day-to-day basis) and the exchange with both researchers and practitioners from European projects fostering RRI on the one hand and colleagues and participants of their small-scale experiments (internal workshops) on the other hand. Accordingly, these experiences are taken up together with the results from present standard practices (point 1) and small-scale experiments (point 2) into the results section.

4 RRI Within National Funding and Innovation Agencies

RVO

Working in a socially responsible way is not new, and like others, RVO is working to take responsibility within its procedures, subsidies, regulations and advices. RVO is currently undergoing a process of change from a task-oriented approach to a more challenge-oriented way of working. In 2018, a roadmap has been designed to accompany this change: The Agenda 2022. The cornerstones of the Agenda 2022 are challenge-oriented, talent-oriented and customer-oriented working. The idea of challenge-oriented working was examined from various stakeholder perspectives (customers, ministries as contractual partners, employees, organisations) and then developed into concrete action points. The aim of RVO is to bring together all knowledge, stakeholders, instruments, etc. regarding a social challenge in order to maximise the social impact. In particular, this way of collaborating with different stakeholders from the beginning of the development process of a regulation until the enactment of a regulation can be considered a de facto RRI way of working. Apart from that, RVO works together with stakeholders on SDG-oriented societal challenges. Awareness raising and agenda-setting are essential in this matter. In this light, RVO has recently developed an SDG mapping tool for regulations. With this SDG mapping tool, RVO raises awareness both internally and in cooperation with stakeholders and partners of RVO. In addition to the challenge-oriented way of working, two other pillars of Agenda 2022 are in the focus of attention: talent-oriented and customer-oriented working. RVO strives to promote the talents of its employees. These diverse talents from across the organisation can then be linked to the challenges identified by RVO, so RVO gets the relevant talents in every collaboration. Secondly, the actual social impact is usually brought about by RVO’s customers, e.g. entrepreneurs, who invest in innovation or sustainability. This implies that instead of working from the regulatory side of things, RVO is in the process of shifting to a customer needs approach.

In addition to the Agenda 2022, RVOs X Lab should be mentioned in connection with de facto RRI activities. X Lab is an innovation laboratory within RVO, which is mainly oriented as a strategic instrument for organisational change. The X Lab stimulates and facilitates policy and process innovations that are aimed towards the level of system innovation and works on a case-by-case basis in order to experiment and design concepts and tools for public services in three general innovation areas: (1) the digital economy, (2) inclusive policies and (3) learning government. The mission of the X Lab is to transform the way current governance works. In essence: “who designs, with whom and how decisions are made in a group”. Important values for X Lab are “collectivity, ownership and co-creation”. X Lab’s main focus is to empower civil servants to explore unusual perspectives and develop new skills and abilities that enable them to think and act on complex challenges. The X Lab helps them to translate policy into services by applying the self-developed tools for systems thinking and service design combined with the in-depth experience and knowledge of RVO in policy implementation. In addition, the X Lab collaborates with entrepreneurs and academics who apply scientific findings in their innovation-oriented work, in order to explore the usability and application of new academic knowledge and insights. This collaboration is based on an exchange of ideas and knowledge of social capital. This leads to new collective activities such as workshops, experiments or even the development of new tools, thus promoting the RRI key public engagement.

FFG

Depending on the funding area, the organisation as a whole is very active in supporting responsible R & I. As a publicly funded research promotion agency, the FFG is highly committed to developing a broader understanding of funding and has for many years created specific programmes and initiatives that can be associated with the RRI keys. This is evident in the development of new instruments that represent a base for implementing research, development and innovation. Particularly noteworthy here is the expansion of the range of funding instruments to include formats such as Innovationswerkstätten that support the formation of innovation laboratories, which allow open access to research facilities and premises, thus enabling real development environments and user-centred innovation projects. In addition to the access to material resources, access to specific know-how, human resources and organisational structures is also made accessible. Furthermore, these innovation laboratories focus on the early involvement of end users and/or society. The innovation process is opened up in the sense of open innovation and expanded to include the design of an innovation-friendly environment for new ideas and concepts, which also promotes a lively exchange of knowledge. In short, innovation laboratories set the framework conditions for research and innovation performance and thus simultaneously promote interdisciplinary cooperation and the early involvement of users and society.

Most projects funded by the FFG are run by companies that build their competitive advantage on keeping their research results closed. Open access is therefore not obligatory for an organisation in order to receive funding from FFG. Yet, costs for open access publications can be billed to FFG.

Ethics aspects are tackled in a more general way, e.g. by the fundamental decisions not to fund military products, weapons technologies or gambling via FFG’s programmes. Beyond that ethics aspects have to be considered – even without an intervention by FFG – in many research and development projects, especially in the fields of medicine, medical technology, veterinary medicine etc., due to European and national regulation. Gender science and gender mainstreaming criteria are included in all FFG programmes and calls for proposals. These criteria reflect gender-specific aspects that need to be incorporated into the content and design of research and innovation projects as well as equal opportunities for women and men. In addition, women, who are usually still underrepresented in research and innovation projects, are addressed through specific funding programmes. The programme Laura Bassi Centres of Expertise funded large-scale research and development projects (so-called centres of excellence) headed and managed by female scientists. These centres of excellence performed research at the interface to industry and focussed on trans- and interdisciplinary research, a timely research culture, team culture and targeted career development, equal opportunity in cooperative research and excellent application-oriented basic research. The programme Laura Bassi 4.0 aims at women who want to participate in actively shaping the digitalisation process through research and development based on the vision of equal opportunity. The format FEMtech Praktika für Studentinnen funds internships for female students with the aim of attracting young female scientists for careers in applied research in the scientific and technical RTI area (research, technology and innovation). The students get to know career entry and advancement paths and receive a sound insight into applied research and development. The programme FEMtech Karriere supports research- and technology-intensive companies in putting equal opportunities into practice. The programme FEMtech Forschungsprojekte supports research, technology and innovation projects with gender-relevant content.

Another de facto RRI activity is the format Ideen Lab 4.0. The format runs an ideation lab in which civil society, politics and public administration work together with science and industry in open innovation processes to identify current societal challenges, design potential solutions to those societal challenges together with those affected and fund research and development projects in which these solutions can then be developed. The format aims to create new interdisciplinary cooperative relationships between researchers and companies in order to co-develop and implement application-oriented projects. Here, de facto RRI can be seen in the thematic element of the inclusion of stakeholders (multi-actor approach) from the start of the ideation lab to the completion of the research and development projects funded by the ideation lab.

De facto RRI aspects can be found also in FFG’s large-scale bottom-up funding programme Basisprogramm. In this case the guidelines contain criteria for funding, e.g. ecology, gender, social aspects or relevance for the region; and applicants have to answer specific questions. It is the applicants’ choice how to respond to the questions or requirements. The answers are compiled in a schematic report and build the basis for the assessment and funding decision by an expert committee.

Currently the biggest shift with respect to the responsibilisation of FFG’s funding practices is the ongoing and stepwise inclusion of sustainability criteria in all FFG programmes and calls for proposals starting with June 2020. These sustainability criteria are based on the concept of the United Nations SDGs and are meant to assure that research and innovation projects funded by FFG provide a stronger contribution to long-term ecological, economic and social sustainability.

TA CR

In the last few years TA CR was involved in several (defacto-)RRI activities and these activities are being developed further.Footnote 2 The internal project SmarterAdmin – financed by ESF – which is aimed at improving the quality of strategic governance inside the agency explicitly works with development of the horizontal agendas of RRI. There is also effort inside the agency to incorporate RRI more explicitly into future funding programmes and support for other RRI projects. As for funding programmes which could be understood as integrating defacto-RRI issues, TA CR had previously funding programmes which were designated for furtherance of applied research and innovation in social sciences and incorporated themes and problems, which intersect with RRI. Now TA CR is readying a new framework funding programme Sigma which will use RRI as one of the main horizontal agendas. This programme will use RRI subthemes and will be focused on developing more advanced dialogue among funding bodies and recipients.

TA CR participates at several Horizon 2020 projects – the GEECCO and GENDER-NET Plus projects are predominantly aimed at the gender dimension of R & I, the NewHoRRIzon project tackles RRI and the new PRO-Ethics project is concerned with the ethical and participatory side of R & I funding. TA CR is also involved in the CHIST-ERA consortium, which is concerned with issues of open access and open data and it could be also understood as a defacto-RRI activity even though it uses the terminology of Open Science. Mere participation in these projects is fostering implementation of tackled issues as there are e.g. corresponding goals set and outputs delivered.

Due to the involvement in the NewHoRRIzon project, TA CR gained a position of a project employee designated as RRI experts. These RRI experts gained recognition in the area of responsible research and innovation with time. And due to the relative lower awareness of how to deal with these issues while knowing it is something important and needs to be dealt with, they were soon recognized as the people to reach to, allowing for (future) mainstreaming of RRI issues.

These experts later gathered in the newly created Department for Methodical Support and Change Management which is dealing with horizontal agendas and projects of internal development. This institutional anchoring provides a stronger position for implementation and integration of RRI into funding practice.

According to the activities described, there are many practices within the agencies, some of which have a long tradition (e.g. gender, involvement of all relevant stakeholders) that can be connected to the concept of the six keys of RRI. In addition, RRI criteria and processes are often already included in funding guidelines. Speaking in RRI-terms, we would identify de facto RRI in the day-to-day work of the agencies considered.

RRI Workshop Experience

Given these de facto RRI activities within the agencies, small-scale internal workshops at RVO and FFG helped to examine how RRI was received and reflected upon by colleagues and teams, with a view to how it could potentially improve their work. The approaches derived from discussions within the RRI-Network and from the generation of micro-projects to explore both the awareness of problem constellations and situations as well as the integration of learnings from RRI discourse into the specific agency contexts. Our approach to the transfer of RRI competences to agency practitioners, which was to be used to change working practices (rather than institutional change), was selective and focused at the micro level.

The authors engaged in two other workshops focussing on discussing RRI within the national R & I funding landscape, the results of these workshops being beyond the scope of this article. The main difference is that the latter ones were inter-organisational workshops disseminating the EC-approach to RRI, while the first two were organized within the respective agency and more specifically oriented to the needs of the institutions, thus translating RRI. The authors decided to concentrate in this article on the organisational-oriented workshops, taking the results of the latter ones into account in Part 3.

Experience of RVO Workshop

The internal workshop at RVO started with an academic overview on interpretations of RRI. Three different approaches on RRI were presented by Anne Loeber (University of Amsterdam): (1) The four process dimensions, (2) Participative negotiation space (Schroth et al. 2018) and (3) Six keys approach.

In the Netherlands, participating with stakeholders is already quite common in policymaking and regulation practices. Even though, still sometimes some stakeholders are not included in such processes. So, the main question for the ten RVO participants in the workshop was: “RRI?! Are we doing this already or can RVO learn from RRI?”

After introducing the participants to the three RRI approaches, the participants were asked to think about their daily work (for instance: executing regulations; improvement of internal processes; or working on international CSR) and if they could recognize (some) elements of RRI in their daily practices. After this, they were asked to reflect on the question whether there would be elements of RRI that were new to them and that they could integrate or use in their daily work. As a last question, the participants collected ideas in the form of a needs analysis to see what it would take to actually implement the ideas gathered under the second question.

There was a consensus between the RVO participants that they recognized elements of RRI in their own practice, but they had not yet known RRI as such. They did not want to re-invent the wheel but were eager to learn more about RRI and to see whether RRI could directly affect RVO tasks. For them to make this work, there should be a very concrete link between RRI and the regulations RVO deals with. For instance, RVO could have a closer look at the link between CSR and RRI, or to find ways where RVO and academic knowledge can meet and learn from each other. Another issue of interest, the participants identified, was in what ways RRI could speed up societal change or reaching policy goals.

As a follow-up, regular meetups between RVO X Lab and the University of Amsterdam have been set up to discuss the needs RVO has and to explore the way(s) RRI could be used to meet these needs. This process is still going on (March 2020).

Experience of FFG Workshop

The internal workshop at FFG in Vienna introduced RRI in three steps. As a first step, the concept of wicked problems (Newman and Head 2017) created a shared understanding of the dynamics underlying todays large-scale societal problem situations that call for new challenge-oriented R & I approaches. In a second step, the workshop provided the participants with a four-quadrant model that highlights different regimes of wicked problems based on the respective degree of social complexity, technological complexity and socio-technological complexity (Fig. 6.1). Finally, different framings of RRI where introduced as distinct approaches towards the solution, resolution and management of wicked problems.Footnote 3

Fig. 6.1
figure 1

An overview of the four-quadrant model. (Schoisswohl 2019, p. 11)

Full size image

Having been introduced to above mentioned types of complexity and their potential interrelatedness, the participants were asked to identify practical examples for each of the quadrants, that is to decide to which form of complexity these examples most precisely relate to. The following group discussions revealed that the participants were most interested in identifying and discussing wicked issues. Tame, technologically complex issues seemed to be of little interest. Most participants voiced strong opinions on the exact position of the identified examples and were convinced that they had gained sufficient understanding of the model as well as the problem situations’ complexity. Actually, the model fostered their reasoning on and understanding of some issues currently transitioning from socially wicked into socio-technologically wicked problem situations due to the current digital transformation. Beyond that there was the overall agreement that there is already quite a bit of work going on at FFG, which could be labelled de facto RRI (Randles et al. 2016) and dates back prior to the invention of the term Responsible Research and Innovation.

The FFG workshop demonstrated that the notion of RRI could be successfully connected to the FFG discourse on the funding of applied research and innovation enacted by its different internal stakeholders. The discourse on RRI and the underlying issues driving the RRI discourse became understandable in terms of the FFG internal discourse beyond internal organisational units and academic backgrounds. Consequently, FFG experts can now own the term RRI without disowning their colleagues of other more established terms or discrediting the practices connected to these more established terms when talking about the necessity to do RRI.

5 Discussion

It is evident that RVO, FFG and TA CR have been addressing and dealing with RRI issues and RRI-like issues via RRI-like approaches and some de facto RRI activities for a significant amount of time. However, the findings of the RVO and FFG workshops also show that it is not yet entirely clear how RRI is reflected in factual changes at the level of everyday funding/innovation practice. It would therefore be helpful to provide a more systematic understanding of RRI and at the same time to use the practical experimenting of the AIRR approach (Stilgoe et al. 2013) as a means of bridging this theory-practice gap. Especially because agency practitioners are tasked with the development of new funding instruments, regulations, formats and programmes for the support of a challenge, or mission-oriented policy approach. This approach welcomes perspectives that help us understand and address the dynamics underlying today’s large-scale societal challenges. Showing that the RRI discourse provides a range of approaches for solution, resolution and management of some of these dynamics.

Good practice examples seem to be vital to raise awareness about the potential benefit of RRI for the agencies’ business, but also to demonstrate ways of practical applicability. Both workshops demonstrate the openness of the participating representatives of the agencies to learn about new approaches that they could potentially use to solve problems and challenges in their daily work context. It became obvious, that for incorporation into agency work, it is essential to present RRI in a way that makes it understandable, placeable, accessible and foremostly concretely applicable for agency practitioners with perspectives drawing on highly diverging disciplinary contexts and discourses and a common understanding of agency work based on the vivid multi-disciplinarity of the historically grown (and distinct) agencies.

Institutionalization of RRI proves to be a very strong tool for RRI integration as the example of TA CR demonstrates: The people dealing with the project NewHoRRIzon and other RRI-like issues were later assembled in the newly created Department for Methodical Support and Change Management, which is dealing with horizontal agendas and projects of internal development. This institutional position enables a stronger lever for implementation and integration of RRI into funding practice. The incorporation of RRI into some funding programmes, its usage in tackling contemporary challenges and even its rudimentary implementation as a crosscutting issue is promising.

But there are also obstacles. These vary depending on the political and cultural contexts. Some agencies are more open to implementation of RRI and RRI-like concepts than others, according to given context. The agencies are also constrained by the conditions of funding – by law, higher-ranking organisations or long-term interorganisational rules. These obstacles provide often limited windows of opportunity when things can be changed and ideally improved. Considering the implementation of RRI, it has to be taken into account that this effort is hobbled by the conditions of financing the activities of the funding agencies, be it by law, higher-ranking organisations or long-term interorganisational rules which can most of the time be little influenced from within the funding agency or by the agency itself. This leads to a necessity of a window of opportunity strategy, i.e. waiting for a reform, introduction of new funding programmes, policy changes, government changes etc. One of the great hindrances was the discontinuity of the SwafS programme as the sole source of RRI-focused project funding in Horizon 2020. These developments, which have easily been interpreted as a signal by the EC on the diminishing importance attributed to RRI, had an irritating effect on those parts of the agencies open to participatory elements in R & I and definitely weakened the inclination to seriously consider RRI.

A major experience has been that different national R & I environments and organisational mandates require specific approaches even though the problems and challenges, which the initiators or advocates of RRI in these funding agencies face, have often the same substance. Although RRI provides a pathway to other parts of the organisation and is working towards similar initiatives, the relative immaturity and plurality of the non-anchored academic field of RRI, with many conceptual discussions, implies that it does not provide easy and universal means to transfer RRI into the practice of funding agencies at the institutional level. In some of the agencies, the RRI dimensions are addressed to a greater or lesser extent, in different ways and with different strengths. Mostly unknown as a term in the agency context but – as learned from the workshop experience adaptable to existing concept-driven (de-facto RRI) day-to-day work –, this new approach has the potential to gain acceptance, become visible and create unexpected additional connections within and outside of the organisation.

At the organisational level, there is a strong drive for improvement with respect to organisational and funding practices. Accordingly, RRI could be and already is considered a way to tackle some of the current challenges and may appeal to those within the R & I systems who have to come up with new solutions. However, national funding agencies face different challenges, some of which can be explained by varying political and cultural contexts, resulting in different attitudes towards and openings for agendas based on long-term strategic reasoning. The search for answers to current challenges can include and welcome RRI expertise.

Beyond that the integration of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) seems to be at times hindered by imaginations and expectations of what a more profound integration of SSH and STEM would entail: STEM wording as well as imaginations, logics and expectations tend to dominate the internal discourses in the agency context, which hence has a tendency towards enacting STEM imaginations and logics.

If RRI would be chosen to learn more from, then a suggestion to funding and innovation agencies and collaborating stakeholders would be not to use RRI in a fluid way. To keep using good agency practices and complement these from RRI where necessary or desirable. The matter of what is desirable is often a policy deliberation. For RVO for example, more knowledge on RRI would then be necessary on a strategic RVO level as well as on a strategic ministry level (since this is the contracting party for RVO). A collaboration between RVO X Lab and an equivalent of X Lab at ministry level could be a starting point. In addition, it would be advantageous to create novel multidisciplinary approaches, with many actors involved, based above all on an integration of research and innovation with practices and spaces of mediation, negotiation, participation and representation. In order to create these spaces and to intensify the involvement of all stakeholders, one possibility would be to involve end users and/or citizens in the process of research and innovation projects as well as in the development of new regulations for new procedures or new subsidy forms. It would also be of interest to extend the policy-science collaboration, as practiced in the workshop with academics of the University of Amsterdam as well as involving educational aspects practiced by X Lab at RVO or in other agency contexts.Footnote 4 In collaborating with even more stakeholders the agencies will benefit from working in different nodes of collaboration to strengthen their joint capacity. Also noteworthy is the benefit from peer-learning or peer-collaboration to understand how to add more and collective value towards the current transitions. Especially the space for discussion and transfer of (not only) RRI-like ideas has been appreciated, which is made possible by international forums or organisations, i.e. TAFTIE, enabling them to find likeminded support by exchange of experience and backing that feeds into their work in the respective national agency.

6 Conclusion and Recommendations

While RRI and the related discourse proved to be rather unknown to the internal discourse of funding and innovation agencies and sometimes perceived as fluid and imprecise as far as its concise use for the agencies’ tasks is concerned, the agency practitioners involved in the described activities experienced the value and benefit of selected RRI practices. The offer to integrate elements of RRI to where and how it is suitable to support responsibility in R & I meets the openness of many involved. Some RRI elements might even add to already introduced new formats within the agencies that work in the same direction, as experienced at FFG and RVO. These are very promising first experiences to build on. However, the empirical analysis of RRI activities already underway in the agencies and the workshop experiences also provided insights showing that it is not yet entirely clear how RRI is reflected in the actual changes at the level of day-to-day funding practice.

The findings inspired the formulation of recommendations for action to bring the strengths of RRI to national R & I funding agencies. In order to really open up the potential benefits of RRI to national funding agencies there seems to be need for action on four levels:

  1. 1.

    The understanding of why RRI is relevant and how it can contribute to improve R & I performance: Facing unprecedented challenges such as climate change, climate adaption or sustainability (actually all challenges named in the SDGs) the agencies are called on to secure the quality of science, the desirability of R & I and their impact. These new ecosystem-like problem constellations imply that the R & I systems need to respond to the resulting wicked problem situations with new ways to tackle them. The solution RRI is offering goes far beyond the six keys and four dimensions offered in many RRI discourses: Taking participation at its core, it offers new opportunities to tackle wicked problem situations and constellations in multi-level multi-disciplinary multi-stakeholder processes, that is in small- to large-scale participatory negotiation spaces. Although identifying challenge-oriented R & I as the need of our time, the practice of these participatory negotiation spaces as integral part of R & I is not altogether unfamiliar to agencies who have been working on the interface of a multitude of different stakeholders since their establishment.

  2. 2.

    The communication on RRI towards and within the agencies: mediating between politics and the respective national R & I landscape on all kinds of issues to be solved, the agencies – and the individuals working on these issues within the agencies – need to be enabled to judge the surplus value of RRI for the outcome of their work. Thus, it is most relevant to adapt the operational when and how of RRI to the language, the needs and the culture of each agency. Best practice examples – at least until practitioners within the agency can build on their own good practice experiences – ease the understanding of benefits, potential barriers and how to overcome them. Actually, the exchange of ideas and new co-operations with external partners familiar with RRI, such as university or non-university research centres or civil society representatives and especially with enterprises already applying RRI to their own benefit, might be very valuable for new impulses to agency practice.

  3. 3.

    The integration of national agencies in participatory RRI spaces: National agencies as R & I funding organisations are addressed by research projects on RRI (mainly on the EU-level) with advice on how to improve their performance to tackle the grand challenges. The research results of these projects are in many cases based on multi-stakeholder processes for reflection, experimentation and experience. The agencies themselves benefit from this advice, however, they tend to stay excluded of these processes and thus outside the experience of practicing RRI and hence cannot influence the outputs of these processes which results in a problematic gap between these outputs and the actualities of national funding and innovation agencies. One main lesson of the RRI-Network partners is that doing RRI is the most convincing experiment to transfer it to regular agency work. Yet, due to a limited consensus within the RRI community on what constitutes RRI and what not the agencies practitioners working within the RRI-Network are often not sure whether it is (a) actual RRI they are doing or (b) whether it is RRI they are transferring or (c) if they are just doing something they perceive as RRI which is in fact not RRI.

  4. 4.

    The development of participatory negotiation spaces: From the perspective of the participating agencies, it is still quite unclear how the concept of participatory negotiation spaces can be put into practice in the context of regular agency business beyond its use in scientific research. The aim should be therefore to bridge the gap between the RRI discourse and the related theoretical knowledge and practical implementation in the context of the political, as it is evident in the context of economy- and enterprise-driven projects of applied research and innovation projects.

Thus, what is practically to be done in the future is to communicate a new understanding of problem situations that demands for new solutions, to convey the practices RRI can offer in a way that agencies can directly link the message to their core business. Finally, it is necessary to increase acceptance and interest in multi-level multi-disciplinary multi-stakeholder processes, practices and spaces. And to reimagine the practice of applied research and innovation in terms of the political that implies to implement new funding programmes that follow the new participatory logic of RRI as a whole as well as the so far relatively little elaborated proposal for participatory negotiation spaces, as they would be required for economy- and business -oriented applied research and innovation projects.