Input from the public is vital to ensuring innovations reflect social needs

The standard model also paints innovation as a discrete, individual achievement—the work of a sole, usually male genius. Such narrow conceptions leave plenty out: think of the custodians who ensure that testing sites remain standardized, the spouses who make it easier for technical experts to work long hours, and the hourly laborers who ensure that repetitive yet crucial tasks are completed. In these ways, the standard model effectively erects a rigid boundary between innovators and laypeople, one that both reflects and reinforces existing social hierarchies. This arrangement creates problems for the substance of technological development. For one thing, it means that innovation is done only from a narrow perspective, missing the opportunity to encourage a broad range of viewpoints and concerns in the early stages of ideation, development, and design. Moreover, it devalues the abilities of those at the grassroots, who may lack specialized training and resources but who have a deep understanding of the problems they face—and often have clear ideas about how to solve them.

Some steps have been taken to bring the public into the fold. Take the water crisis in Flint, Michigan that broke out in 2014. Researchers flocked to the city to help it cope with lead poisoning, Legionnaire’s disease, and the scores of pipes that were damaged after the local government switched its water source to the Flint River. But many citizens were wary. Not only was the low-income, majority-Black community well aware of the racist history of science that included the Tuskegee syphilis experiment; they had also had previous engagements with researchers that left them feeling invisible. In these interactions, researchers had both diminished community knowledge and concerns and appropriated their ideas. This learned wariness was validated during the crisis: at first, scientists dismissed the severity of the city pipes’ lead problem and any link between the Legionnaire’s outbreak and the water supply.

In response, residents created the Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center (HFRCC) and the Flint Center for Health Equity Solutions (FCHES) along with researchers at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Flint. These centers were designed to ensure equitable partnerships between Flint residents and Michigan universities that put the community’s needs, rather than scientists’ research agendas, first. Both identify needs and develop solutions collaboratively between researchers and residents, ensure appropriate credit is given to community members, create research efficiencies, and ensure ethical practices. Frustrated at first by the “helicopter researchers” who arrived in the city after the water crisis, community members now work with scientists to ensure that insights developed from the community’s data are brought back to inform and improve the city. Residents have also raised new research topics. In response to concerns about high rates of asthma, for example, researchers used geographic information system data to connect asthma rates with historical pollution from car factories, which eventually informed the response, including the deployment of mobile health units.

Technical expertise does not equal social wisdom.

These programs demonstrate the valuable insights that communities can bring to the innovation process. But such efforts are small in scale—the exception rather than the norm—and there is much work that still needs to be done higher up the chain. Rather than being thought of as an end-stage concern, community expertise could instead be brought in from the very start. The institutions that drive innovation—including government, industry, universities, and philanthropic foundations—could fundamentally transform innovation processes by harnessing community expertise at every stage, starting with priority setting. Currently, the primary decision makers in the innovation pipeline are the technical and business communities who influence investments through advisory boards and review panels. Because they have specialized understandings of research and development, their participation seems appropriate. But technical expertise does not equal social wisdom.

As it stands, though, community voices are practically nonexistent in the decision making phase. The public can generally shape innovation only at arm’s length—voting for Joe Biden knowing that he is likely to invest heavily in cancer research, for example, or expressing their collective will through what they do or do not purchase. But this need not be the case. Innovation institutions could integrate non-technical communities into their existing decision making apparatuses in a variety of ways, from encouraging or even mandating their participation in expert advisory bodies to establishing offices of substantive community engagement in research funding agencies. Another way to incorporate community knowledge is through the creation of citizen forums, where a variety of communities could help to determine funding priorities and research programs.

For such efforts to be successful, however, the public, private, and nonprofit sectors must commit to incorporating these relationships into their policies and practices. For example, this engagement could lead to the development of new research programs that center the knowledge of communities experiencing a given problem. Researchers could also take explicit steps to ensure that the knowledge and concerns of historically disadvantaged groups, who are invariably ignored in scientific endeavors, are privileged. Institutions could also fund community organizations or grassroots innovators directly, connecting them with technical expertise and infrastructure to help evaluate their ideas and turn them into interventions. This kind of participation is already common in India, where the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and National Innovation Foundation (NIF) are structured to value community-based knowledge. For example, in the early 2010s CSIR worked with the Self-Employed Women’s Association, an NGO, to design and manufacture low-cost disposable menstrual pads that fit women’s priorities and needs.

Finally, humanists and social scientists who study innovation could be integrated into the processes of priority setting and project evaluation, and could also participate as collaborators on the types of projects articulated above. At present, this expertise is rarely recognized in the development and evaluation of emerging technologies. But they offer a crucial perspective. While marginalized communities have direct and comprehensive knowledge of their own circumstances, the challenges they face, and the problems they have historically experienced with technology, social analysts offer a systematic understanding of how society shapes and is shaped by technologies. As a result, they can often anticipate problems that those more directly engaged with a technology cannot see and offer solutions based on their knowledge of other cases. In essence, they provide a different kind of technical expertise—contextual and systematic understanding of innovation in society—that is too often ignored.