The Responsible Research and Innovation Roadmap “RRI Roadmap” has been released! The RRI Roadmap aims at assisting any research and innovation project or initiative, and any institution or company to develop innovations and achieve results that have useful impacts to the society and to the environment.
As already mentioned in previous issues of MARINAzine, RRI is becoming an important cross-cutting priority for European research and innovation calls and it includes diverse sectors like agriculture, blue growth, bio-economy, food sector, resource efficiency, raw materials. RRI promotes responsible, socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable growth by carefully taking into consideration science, public engagement and ethics.

Why use the RRI Roadmap?

Responsible growth is about creating radical or incremental innovations and economic development, but in a socially and environmentally sustainable manner. RRI promotes engaging with other societal actors to understand an issue from different perspectives and to execute research-work and achieve innovations that are all-inclusive. The MARINA project has shown that societal actor engagement improves understanding, relationships, acceptance for change and improves trust among stakeholders. Another MARINA conclusion is that most people do not understand the RRI dimensions as such, even though they may have used them in their actions.
The RRI Roadmap gives you a fast overview and a step-by-step approach of how to:
1. Achieve pragmatic goals, create good relationships and build trust with your immediate stakeholders and wider end-users of your research results and innovations;
2. Help you make better decisions, share and mobilise knowledge to increase the impact of your work and to ease the uptake of your research work and innovation results;
3. Create new opportunities through a common vision and co-defined action plan, because when stakeholders are involved in definitions and decisions, they “take ownership” of the results and they push further for their acceptance. Thus, they will ease your work at the end.

How to use the RRI Roadmap?

The RRI Roadmap has boiled-down all the conclusions from the MARINA project, other relevant EU projects’ experiences, change management and modern project management approaches and design-thinking concepts into eight clearly defined milestones with actions. Each milestone relates to two or more RRI dimensions.

Be one of the first to apply the RRI Roadmap!

DOWNLOAD THE RRI ROADMAP & SHARE IT

In parallel, we have been working to extract practical lessons learned from the many MARINA mobilisation and mutual learning workshops in order to make the RRI Roadmap even more practical and operational. The partners ISPRA, World Ocean Network, Mare Nostrum under the leadership of XPRO Consulting have been closely working to distill the extracted knowledge, classify it and generalise it, so that each step of the RRI Roadmap has some good examples and things-to-avoid examples. All lessons learned and good practices can be consulted in the MARINA Knowledge Sharing Platform and in the MARINApedia.

(By Xenia Theodotou Schneider, XPRO Consulting Limited)