Ethics in Business Research and Innovation. An Institutionalisation Framework

A literature review of the RRI framework in the business and industry context reveals that some studies contain very different approaches and are grouped according to the purposes they pursue. Firstly, some studies take the RRI concept and show its value for conducting RRI in private corporations (Gurzawska 2021; Lubberink et al. 2017; Stahl et al. 2017). Secondly, different authors have attempted to show existing connections or those that might develop between an RRI perspective and a CSR one (Dreyer et al. 2017; Gurzawska 2021; Martinuzzi et al. 2018; Timmermans et al. 2017). Finally, a considerable number of studies have analysed the activities and mechanisms in the CSR domain that might be construed as being compatible with developing R&I processes from an RRI perspective (Auer and Jarmai 2017; Lubberink et al. 2017; van de Poel et al. 2017).

Among the first type of study, those conducted as part of EU-financed projects stand out. Special attention should be paid to three projects: the Responsible-Industry Project (http://​www.​responsible-industry.​eu), undertaken between 2014 and 2017; ResAgora (https://​res-agora.​eu), which began in 2013 and ended in 2016; PRISMA (www.​rri-prisma.​eu), from 2016 to 2019.

The hypothesis that these studies attempt to show is that RRI is relevant for business and industry and can positively impact companies’ performance through, for example, public engagement, and assuming values related to gender integrity and perspective. Three areas describe the positive impact: improved corporate image and its relationship with stakeholders; developing the organisation’s CSR commitment, deeply rooted in research actions and processes; and certain business and industrial areas associated with health, demography, education and consumption. The latter are still at a stage where their value is not fully understood, appreciated or put to best use (Stahl et al. 2017). This study shows that the RRI concept is gradually penetrating the business and industry context, even at firms that already carry out activities and adopt strategies linked with RRI. This often occurs because such firms have a well-established and quite mature CSR policy. So “companies could not identify any specific features of R&I related to responsibility differing from CSR” (Inzelt and Csonka 2017, p. 72).

This study pragmatically shows how RRI can be integrated into business CSR policies and strategies (van de Poel et al. 2017). However, the development of these ideas in the context of business scientific research and innovation is less clear. Special attention should be paid to the pioneering works by Dreyer et al. (2017) and Timmermans et al. (2017), which reveal the importance of implementing an RRI perspective into R&I processes that overlap and are coordinated with the CSR and Business Ethics policy to cope with two major challenges in the industry. The first of these is the need to be proactive in dealing with the stakeholders’ demands by generating public engagement throughout the R&I cycle. Secondly, firms must maintain society’s trust through innovations that generate ethical and social value, as well as financial profits.

Research works about knowledge of RRI and CSR in the business-industry context show that knowledge of RRI in these contexts is very poor. The same can be stated for understanding RRI based on meeting external normative regulations or standards. Hard-law governance is therefore understood more than soft-law governance or self-regulation (Stahl et al. 2019; Timmermans et al. 2017). However, the latter is the perspective that appears after the responsibility concept of RRI.

Moreover, as well as the projects on RRI in the industry context and literature on RRI and CSR, we can also pay attention in this business and industry context to activities or practices that tend to be linked with their social responsibility. Some works, like those by Lubberink et al. (2017) and Inzelt and Csonka (2017), show that, although there are CSR actions, strategies and mechanisms linked with each RRI dimension (anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion/deliberation and responsiveness), as well as some key RRI areas, there are not a development of any planned programme to conduct RRI.

The key to making the link between CSR and RRI effective is introducing them into the company’s CSR strategy and policy. Different studies show from the management point of view that “(…) responsibility applies to all aspects of a company, not exclusively to innovation. RI is, therefore, part of broader policies and strategies for CSR or CS. A CSR or CS policy is intended to function as a self-regulating mechanism for business to ensure its compliance not just with laws, but also with the spirit of the law, with international norms and with ethical standards” (Gurzawska 2021:7). Along with Gurzaswka et al., we conclude that “Therefore, corporate responsibility, including responsibility in the context of innovation, should be tied to business strategies and performance, through a systematic approach involving planning, implementation, evaluation and control” (2021:17).

These three approaches – projects, studies and practice analyses – reveal that connection points between RRI and CSR are not that evident for business and industrial stakeholders. Firstly, they are often unaware of the RRI concept even though they perform activities, strategies and policies framed within the dimensions (anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion/deliberation and responsiveness) and key issues (ethics, governance, gender equality, open access, science education and public engagement) of RRI. Secondly, it can be concluded that RRI forms a part of CSR in most of these approaches. So RRI must be taken as a model that better allows an organisation’s R&I policy and strategy to be developed ethically and responsibly.

This paper sets out to explain this link between CSR and RRI through the reflexivity dimension that exists in every organisation, and which is imbued with values that require an ethical-critical vision, as will be argued below.

Many studies emphasise the need to increase the capacity to discern which social and ethical values any R&I must pursue and/or fulfil to be considered responsible. This is the way to respond to this meta-responsibility, which principally takes a retrospective view. Two levels are acknowledged: the existence of moral and social values and norms, or a descriptive level, on one hand; and the identification and acknowledgement of desirable social and ethical values and norms being valid or correct on the other. In other words, different epistemic and pragmatic approaches generally recognise the basic distinction in the moral philosophy between morality and ethics or, as stated in Habermasian terms, between applicability and validity (Habermas 1990).

However, the search for the definition of universal ethical values is generally evidenced which, as 21st -century moral philosophy well demonstrates, does not exist substantively, but in a procedural way. In particular, the philosophical current of discourse ethics, as outlined by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, has been able to provide a clear explanation and rigorous basis for this approach. In the domain of ethics, which encompasses both firms and research, numerous philosophers have highlighted the value of defining ethical values within a business and research context (Apel 2017; Cortina et al. 2008; García-Marzá 2004; Habermas 1987b, 1990; Lozano and Monsonís-Payá 2020). It can be posited that it is possible to define the values of sociability and ethical conduct underpinning dialogue and deliberation processes. These values should be such that all those affected by an activity or norm feel included, under the closest conditions of symmetry and equality. So what is universal is the procedure by which we manage to pass correct, fair, desirable or good judgement of a value. However, the value defined should always to criticism because dialogue and deliberation processes must always be rooted at the heart of activities, organisations or institutions.

However, it is true that these real consensuses, if they come from processes that meet certain procedural guarantees like those mentioned in the discourse ethics programme, can be considered excellent candidates for RRI orientation frameworks. For example, some of the more substantial proposals found in the specialised literature can be considered. These might include the ethical and fundamental values of the European Union’s European Charter (Ruggiu 2019a, b); the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), a framework of 17 goals developed by the UN to tackle the world’s most pressing social, economic and environmental challenges in the lead-up to 2030 (Dreyer et al. 2017; Stahl 2021); and the civic ethics proposal of traditional discourse ethics (Lozano and Monsonís-Payá 2020).

In any case, these proposals or others ought to be the result of ethical-critical reflexive processes to ensure that they are the result of critical rationality. This rationality is constructed through a process of justification of beliefs to others, and is neither a virtue per se nor a strict process. The present study deals with this aspect below.

The “reflexivity” concept is presented in most literature specialising in RRI and Research Ethics along with those of “reflection” and “critical reflection”, which are sometimes interchangeable with it. The risks resulting from such lack of precision have been well-argued from the fields of sociology, philosophy, economics and science, among others.

When the “reflexivity” concept appears in the configuration of an RRI approach, it does so alongside “an attempt to render scientific practices more openly reflective about (and thus also perhaps, reorienting) some of the key commitments driving and structuring science, and what shapes society in the name of science” (Wynne 2011, p. 792). The existence of reflexive actions and processes that scientists carry out every day is underlined. Indeed, they sometimes do this without being aware of the social and ethical values and norms involved in such reflections. Hence the need to move away from mere “reflexivity” towards “conscious and critical reflexivity”. This means, firstly, that it should be systemised or formalised in research processes and spaces and, secondly, extended to cover aspects that occur inside and outside the laboratory or workgroup. The concept therefore opens up and becomes public reflexivity open to criticism.

RRI works and considerations acknowledge two reflection levels or orders in “reflexivity” following the pioneering proposal of Schuurbiers (Schuurbiers 2011; van de Poel et al. 2017): first-order reflection and second-order reflection.

First-order reflection is linked with reflection on underlying proposals, motivations, values, what is known, areas of ignorance, assumptions, motivations, commitments and ethical dilemmas (Owen et al. 2012). This thought occurs in research systems. What is promoted is internal reflection, but this does not imply reflecting on the values that underlie the system, only on practices or activities.

At this level, the aspects being worked on are linked with either individual professional aspects and decision-making or professional deontology. Ethical reflection is situated within the broader field of “ethics about R&I”, which encompasses the ethical considerations associated with research. Furthermore, ethics is associated with or included in moral intuitions and the explicit morality that stakeholders point out as being desirable or acceptable (Owen et al. 2012; von Schomberg 2011).

Second-order reflection centres on reflection on norms, socio-political contexts, political agendas, institutional practices, behaviours and epistemologies. This type of thought appears about the research system (organisations and institutions) and its underlying values. This reflexivity level provides a critical conscience about the epistemic bases of knowledge; about how knowledge is generated; and even about the social relevance of research. For example, Genus and Iskandarova (2018) carried out a study of the institutionalisation of responsible innovation following a discursive neo-institutionalism approach, “which explicitly brings together a critical view of discourse with sociologically informed institutional analysis” (p.2). After an analysis of the texts and discursive and social practices in the institutionalisation of responsible innovation, they show the need to critically review the assumptions that sustain it.

Second-order reflection allows one to reflect on first-order reflection; in other words, on the rules, socio-political contexts, institutionalised practices, behaviours and epistemologies (Owen and Pansera 2019). Therefore, the ethical, social and political commitments underlining the practices and objectives of both laboratories and science are not generated, and are automatically reinforced without making a broad and critical reflection beforehand (Wynne 2011).

With this explanation, the question that immediately arises is how these two reflexivity levels can be carried out in organisational contexts, in our case industry and business. We now go on to indicate the routes that have been opened up from normative positions, and also from practical organisational experiences or from managing R&I projects.

Achieving second-order reflection in the organisational context requires social scientists’ joint and collaborative work, as well as experimental or natural work in the laboratory (Salles et al. 2018; Schuurbiers 2011; Wynne 2011). Such collaboration in the laboratory is called midstream modulation because, following a co-creation procedural methodology, it is capable of generating second-order reflection. This is the case because not only are socio-ethical problems made visible in the laboratory, this also encourages those participating in the research to critically reflect on these problems with other stakeholders involved. This collaboration type goes beyond the area of relations between social and experimental sciences to also cover the possibility of joint reflection by all the stakeholders shaping science and making it possible.

This reflexivity type is expected to bring about some change, particularly for identifying the discourses or interests that do not remain in research and science, or for avoiding possible mistakes. To a certain extent, the invocation of the need for reflexivity is coupled with the critical and emancipatory potential it might entail.

As we see, reflexivity is linked with the hope that its mere existence can allow discourses to be constructed wherever reflection occurs or, otherwise, transformations of subjectivities, or proposals seeking social transformation. However, it is not always used for this purpose. At times it is employed for reinforcing conventions and already well-established ways of proceeding and is consists of reinforcing established knowledge in the form of objectives not open to criticism.

As this study attempts to show, the two reflexivity levels, and the possibilities opened up by second-order reflection related to anticipatory governance, reveal two possible ways of dealing with reflexivity in organisations. One of these is conventional, but the other is post-conventional and critical.

The latter associates reflexivity with anticipatory governance that is either ethical-legal (von Schomberg 2011) or discourse-ethical-critical (González-Esteban 2019; Lozano and Monsonís-Payá 2020).

The main advantage of ethical-legal normative reflection is that it sets its sights on agreements and treaties established by the typical legal-political mechanisms of our complex interconnected societies. In the RRI context, the “normative anchors” present in EU Treaties are proposed as a source of such normativity (Owen et al. 2012; Stilgoe et al. 2013). Although this specification is a positive one, it could become its limit at the same time, firstly because a substantive and material (non-procedural) definition could be followed without awareness of its content or implications. This could lead to not all stakeholders acknowledging these normative anchors because they would not be affected by them, being outside the legal-political pact or contract.

Hence the importance of opting for post-conventional second-order reflection of the ethico-critical discourse type, which, as this study goes on to show, overcomes these obstacles. It also provides an answer that is good enough for complex and interdependent societies and for problems requiring cooperation on a worldwide scale so they can face contexts with moral pluralism requiring answers that can be made universal.

An ethical-critical discourse normative reflection proposal is provided in detail by González-Esteban (2019). For space reasons, and given the objectives of this study, it is enough to point out that ethical-discourse reflection allows research and/or innovation activity to be oriented amid the diversity of values, norms and moral principles that exist in contexts with global moral pluralism. This orientation is allowed because it makes it possible to discern between what is correct and incorrect by establishing ideal communication communities. Using these, an approach can be made to build consensuses about that which all those affected (by research and/or innovation activity) will be able to accept as fair.

By contrast, other studies delve deeply into the potential of reflection in the field of research and innovation for addressing broader societal concerns, as well as exploring the role of deliberative competence and the broader debate surrounding deliberative democratic forms versus agonistic pluralism within the realm of public affairs (Chilvers 2008; Dryzek and Pickering 2017; Mouffe 1999). In contrast to the current study, the difference lies in the implementation space, focusing on the discourse of critical-ethical reflexivity that can arise from implementing an ethical governance design at the company organisational level.

With this procedure, the definition of “moral responsibility” in the R&I context is considered as if it were integrative applied ethics, and with all the implications that this entails. The most important implication for the main objective of the present work is the need to design R&I activities in such a way that affected parties’ participation and deliberation are institutionalised now or in the future by these R&I activities (Habermas 1970, 1987a, 1990). Such institutionalisation will encourage collaboration between different areas of knowledge and sciences, but by counting on those affected. A committed firm, with emancipatory and social transformation aspirations, will therefore be able to carry out research and/or innovation.

The key lies in designing and promoting ethical-critical reflection spaces that enable second-order normative reflection concerning the moral values, principles and norms that guide the purposes, processes and outcomes of science and technology. The discursive institutionalist approach rooted in Habermas attempts to establish the conditions of possibility for: (a) recognising all those affected and the possible positions they might take when considered in the spaces for dialogue, (b) making sure open, critical dialogue in which each interlocutor can show their interests and preferences is possible, and (c) reaching consensuses or, if they cannot be achieved, ensuring dialogue is always left open under the concept of an unlimited communication community. If this path, consisting of practical discourse, is followed, there will be dissent, because there will be questioning of preferences, values, rules or the acceptance of likely consequences, among other critical aspects that may arise. This shows the value of second-order reflection and, sometimes, the difficulties of applying it in practice.

When applying second-order reflection to the circumstances lying in the ethical and discursive proposal of reflexivity, following Owen and Pansera (2019, pp.33–35) we must consider and include various criticisms. (i) In the deliberation processes expert knowledge and/or that structured via representation must be considered and shared, as well as being translated into the language of those affected, so it is not lost, disparaged or considered at the same level as the knowledge of those without in-depth knowledge of the matters under consideration. (ii) In the deliberation processes, although the ultimate objective has to be to seek consensus, dissent must be considered as progress, but dialogue and deep knowledge of the problems and possible ways of solving them must be identified as advances and progress towards Responsible Research and Innovation. (iii) It is important to point out that the Habermasian proposal points out that legitimacy in the political field will come from the representation of those affected, but in the public sphere it will come from the direct participation of those affected (or their representatives if they have organised themselves). Therefore, sometimes, if civil society has not organised and structured itself with regard to the purposes, developments, impacts and results of research and innovation, its participation and the legitimacy of its participation can be seen to be appear to be called into question. (iv) Finally, the existence of legal and political frameworks that encourage critical reflexivity is essential so that the proposal put forward here in part three is possible. Because in societies where cooperation between civil society, business and politics is understood as the mechanism for good governance, this will encourage the development of more reflexive research and innovation.

Finally, another difficulty must be pointed out, (v) related to the consideration and the role of the participants in the deliberation. Although the generation of spaces for reflection and deliberation on innovation and research at the different stages (design, development and results) is one of the prior assumptions of RRI, sometimes this real participation is undermined in practice. This is because those affected are not included in the analysis and deliberation processes as valid interlocutors in the discourse but merely as a passive audience who can only accept or reject what is suggested to them, without the right to intervene with arguments on the purposes, assumptions or processes of the innovation or research being discussed (Chilvers 2010; Genus and Iskandarova 2018).

Talking about governance means recognising that participation and interrelation in management or decision-making of the State, companies and civil society are necessary, and this is done by considering the many levels at which such interrelations take place: local, regional, national or international. In the RRI domain, “anticipatory governance” has been defined as “(…) a broad-based capacity extended through society that can act on a variety of inputs to manage emerging knowledge-based technologies while such management is still possible” (Guston 2014, p. 218). Therefore, anticipatory governance particularly involves motivating activities that allow the mobilisation of both expert and non-expert R&I stakeholders so that, when faced with the impossibility of calculating the probabilities of risks related to new technologies and innovation processes, they are at least able to detect certain forms of rejection, opposition and moratorium, as well as the desirable impacts believed necessary in such deliberative processes in a participated manner. In this way, anticipatory governance contemplates both hazards and risks as interests associated with technological developments (political, economic and civil society) to reach a consensus about the bases for the democratic management of the objectives that R&I must pursue (Gianni 2019).

So anticipatory governance shows that, not only are impacts or outcomes subject to democratic deliberation, but so are, explicitly or implicitly, the process, design, innovation and interests that promote scientific R&I (Urueña 2022; Wynne 2002, p. 464). Hence the institutionalisation of ethical-discourse reflexivity favours the very possibility of this anticipatory governance, which is multi-level (local, national and international) and multi-actor (all the parties or stakeholders affected by a firm’s activity). Such an institutionalisation type like those considered here must be carried out by mechanisms of self-regulation or soft-law governance. Reaching consensuses is essential in the organisational or sectorial context so that, based on belief in the need to guide R&I activity insofar as these consensuses recognise the ethical and social values in the design, objective, processes and outcomes of research and innovation activity, these consensuses can be integrated into an organisation’s CSR policy. This would be feasible and fruitful in line with previous studies about shared and different points, and also about knowledge and acknowledgement from the business context of both approaches.

In the business context, the main driver for business ethics and CSR institutionalisation has been derived from self-regulation. This does not mean that traditional regulatory or hard-law governance frameworks are not necessary. Nevertheless, it is worth acknowledging that the latter “is not sufficient for the oversight of emerging technologies, such as AI and robotics. While government regulators and policymakers still play a critical role, oversight must be expanded to also include new institutions and methods that are more agile, holistic, reflexive and inclusive” (Wallach and Marchant 2019, p. 506). This is the main reason why combining the frameworks has been the option generally taken to encourage the institutionalisation of ethics, with the development and proposal of self-regulation frameworks (Stahl, 2021).

Examples of soft law are measurements that can be made and driven from different instances, including governments, industrial stakeholders, non-governmental organisations, professional societies, standardisation or normalisation organisations, opinion groups, public-private foundations, or any combination of these. Many examples of soft law exist, such as voluntary programmes, codes of ethics and conduct, codes of good practices, ethics committees, certification programmes, guidelines and statements of principles.

There are many advantages of governance based on self-regulation: (1) it can be adopted and amended quite quickly to adapt to any changes in the external or internal environment; (2) it can adopt the same formulation for different contexts and territories; (3) it might involve all the organisation’s stakeholders by allowing them to cooperate in its formulation even, and also during the process of setting up governance mechanisms and following them up (Wallach and Marchant 2019).

Above all, limitations have to do with the lack of mechanisms to ensure compliance, and also with the lack of coordination that regulatory mechanisms provide. It is worth pointing out that progress made in self-regulation mechanisms, reports and documents is often used as a basis for regulatory developments. Another limitation is related to the widespread use of different programmes or systems to deal with the same situation or matter, as firms may take some time in differentiating which self-regulation programme or proposal best matches its activity or which one is simpler or easier to set up, among other reasons (Wallach and Marchant 2019). This study proposes encouraging the self-regulation of business and industry that develop RRI as part of an organisation’s CSR policies which, as readers are reminded, are also self-regulation policies. In this way, integrating ethical-discourse reflexivity into the heart of research activities will be possible. This idea falls very much in line with the demand by many experts in RRI from different fields of application (Salles et al. 2018) to integrate “ethicists and social theorists into design teams, not as naysayers, but as fellow designers sensitive to ethical and societal concerns” (Wallach and Marchant 2019, p. 507). Likewise, there is an analysis or evaluation of ethical and social impacts through rigorous risk assessments.

So it is necessary to promote and design processes in organisations that allow this second-order ethical-discourse reflection to guarantee, from the very core of the organisation, a space in which “one thinks about how one’s underlying values systems and beliefs influence the development of innovation, and what the role of the organisation and its innovation are in the wider political and socio-economic system” (Lubberink et al. 2017, p. 20). At the same time, such processes must see that the asymmetry of information, always present in business research and innovation, is no obstacle to the inclusion of stakeholders in the design and development of innovation and/or research, because, as people affected in the present or future, they must be part of the decision-making process. From a pragmatic point of view, this aspect is perhaps one of those can involve the greatest difficulties, as noted by Blok and Lemmens (2015) and descriptively analysed by Lubberink et al. (2019). The ETHNA System model includes this intention by incorporating bottom-up and top-down deliberation processes within the organisation itself.

A governance system that, from the firm, acknowledges traditional regulatory frameworks, but goes beyond them by generating coordinated self-regulation with lawmakers and civil society. In short, governance in which the market, State and civil society work jointly in ethical orientation intends to take place in R&I, and also in areas like social innovation, biotechnologies, neurosciences, Artificial Intelligence, robotics, etc. This self-regulation affects both the organisations that finance science and those that conduct science in public/private academic or business contexts (Hovdal et al. 2022).

The ETHNA System project is working along these lines. It has proposed an ethical governance system of R&I processes in centres where research is carried out (research performance organisations – RPO) and in organisations that finance R&I (funding research organisations). So the ETHNA System is intended to promote ethical governance structures and processes for R&I in any field. By way of example, it has been recently proposed for the field of Artificial Intelligence (González-Esteban and Calvo 2022). It is being applied as six pilot schemes at two universities, and in one applied research centre, one social research centre and one technology park.

The ETHNA System comprises a structure, known as an RRI Office(r), that acts as the base of a system. The main tasks of this RRI Office(r) focus on aligning the existing resources and structures in an organisation, linked with RRI dimensions and key areas; identifying the commitment that an organisation wishes to make with RRI; drawing up an action plan that allows existing resources to move to help an organisation to be committed and to ethically promote RRI. From this point, we should work on aligning those actions that are to be developed and are linked with the organisation’s CSR. Aligning processes and analysing an organisation’s economic, social and environmental impacts from the R&I perspective will allow an organisation’s social responsibility to further develop.

The ETHNA System proposes that this RRI Office(r) has an Ethics Committee for R&I and an Ethics Line to develop its action plan and be committed to a code of ethics and practices. All these governance structures are monitored with indicators that measure not only the system’s progress but also the progress made.

For any business organisations that already have such structures linked with their Social Responsibility (Code of Ethics and Conduct, Ethics Committee, Ethics Hotline and Responsibility Report), the challenge involves developing them by considering RRI dimensions and keys so that they generate consensuses (code of good practices) on the values and norms that must orientate an organisation’s R&I activity.

The dimensions that this structure promotes are anticipation, the inclusion of all groups of interest linked with research activity, reflexivity about design, the development and impact of R&I, and the responsiveness that the whole institution must have internally and externally. The areas that the ETHNA System covers are governance, research integrity, the gender perspective, public commitment and open access, although other areas of interest to the organisation can be incorporated, such as sustainability, ethical digitisation, and so on. Considering that, as the specialised RRI bibliography shows, the thematic content of responsible innovation and research must not be understood to be constrained by the keys that were priorities in the science funding programmes within the European Union framework, nor must they be explored only in the business, technical and scientific context or paradigm (Blok and Lemmens 2015; Owen and Pansera 2019; Owen et al. 2021; Novitzky et al. 2020).

The most outstanding characteristic of the ETHNA System is that it offers a flexible ethical governance system so that all institutions, either RFO or RPO and depending on the context they operate in, e.g., universities, technology parks, innovation centres, applied research and technology centres, etc., can use the parts of the ETHNA System that they need (González-Esteban et al., 2023). The reasons why a firm or industry adopts an ethical governance system have to do with the commitment that it aims to have with socially desirable and ethically acceptable R&I. And the motivations behind this reasons can be either normative (concerned with doing the right thing) or instrumental (achieving the acceptance of products and services) as noted in the empirical studies indicated in the first part of this article. Ethical challenges in business and industrial contexts are growing and come in different types, and such variability gives rise to unpredictable scenarios.

As this study has shown, one of the most pressing challenges identified calling for a structural response is to build ethical governance systems for R&I that can be aligned with an organisation’s CSR policies so they can be self-regulated within existing regulatory frameworks, sometimes even going beyond the provisions of these frameworks. This proposal includes the recognition of different paradigms behind RRI proposals (Timmermans & Blok, 2018). It also suggests thinking of the development of research and innovation based on an ethical and critical paradigm of governance which, at the same time, acknowledges the existence of a specific socio-political and economic governance paradigm, based on which second-order reflection has to be carried out.