Extinction---breakthrough innovations are vital to stave off numerous existential threats.

I then realized two things. First, the concept of innovation defines our age. It fuels the global economy, promises a sustainable future, and stands at the heart of our interconnected society. Not only was the underground surrounded with all kinds of innovations, but we have even reached a point in history where people are reading about innovation and – as the commuter would later confess – dream of becoming innovators themselves, for public icons like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are praised in the same way artists and scientists were in previous times. Second, the concept of innovation is widely presupposed in terms of the commercial value it generates. In this view, innovation is only considered valuable insofar customers are willing to pay for it. As claimed in the tradition of economic analysis, innovation is characterized by its competitive dynamics and is primarily directed at developing marketable products and services (Stoneman 1995).

At the same time, our geopolitical landscape faces an unprecedented crisis, overwhelmed with global issues such as climate change, overpopulation, water shortage, a loss of biodiversity, food security, and the more recent COVID-19 pandemic. The reality of these issues increasingly urge innovation to generate societal value beyond mainstream economic incentive. This is particularly the case in the context of the European Union (EU), which strives to represent high ethical standards on the world stage and thus prioritizes normative objectives on its political agenda. To this end, the EU policy discourse has paved the way for Responsible Innovation (RI). The core idea here is to steer innovation processes towards societally desirable outcomes, specifically in response to the so-called grand challenges of our time (European Commission 2015). A frequently cited and particularly influential definition of RI calls for “a transparent, interactive process by which societal actors and innovators become mutually responsive to each other with a view on the (ethical) acceptability, sustainability and societally desirability of the innovation process and its marketable products” (von Schomberg 2013, p. 63). Under the sway of science with and for society, the hypothesis is that innovation can only respond to the needs and ambitions of society by including all its actors throughout the process. As such, in 2011, RI made its entry by the name of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) as a cross-cutting issue under the EU Framework Program for Research and Innovation ‘Horizon 2020’. More recently, RRI has been articulated in terms of six keys – ethics, societal engagement, gender equality, open science, science education, governance – through which the EU imposes a strong normative view of what constitutes responsibility in innovation processes (European Commission 2020).