The permutation confines ethics to the production stage

(Thomas Taro Lennerfors, IndustrialEngineering@Uppsala and Kiyoshi Murata, BusinessEthics@Meiji, Innovation Ethics In Debating Innovation: Perspectives and Paradoxes of an Idealized Concept ed. Rehn and Ortenblad)

In most of the frameworks surveyed and within discussions about innovation ethics, the phases of research and development of technology and putting it into a product/service are seen as the most important for tech nological innovation to be ethical—and this is what we mean by the focus on invention ethics. However, invention ethics runs the risk of underestimating responsibility in the rest of the technology lifecycle, and how innovators and others can be involved in innovation processes beyond design. We need to consider not only the values embedded in the process of developing innovative technologies, but the values emerging from or proposed by technologies during use as well as the rest of the lifecycle. Innovation ethics should also concern long-term ethical impacts of innovation and how societies monitor the ethics of innovations that are being implemented in society. Given the unpredictability of the inno vation process, ethical reflection needs to be iterative and processual, not only in the early stages.