Responsible Innovation

How can you assess and address uncertainties, potential risks and public and ethical concerns surrounding your innovation projects? How can you ensure that new products and services are safe? How can your innovation strategy achieve commitment from all stakeholders and enhance competitiveness and profitability?

Responsible Innovation (RI) enables companies to anticipate social and ethical issues and integrate them into their innovation and design processes and business strategy right from the start. This has a number of advantages:

ensures that appropriate measures are taken to prevent/reduce potential risks from developments in science and technology, including unintended consequences, security and transparency issues.

strengthens public trust in the safety of products.

enhances the company’s reputation and contributes to a motivated workforce.

increases medium-term competitiveness and profitability.

This course will enable engineers, managers and entrepreneurs to integrate RI in their company’s innovation strategy.

You will be able to design a roadmap to embed RI in your business strategy and CSR policies, using a new European Standard which provides guidelines for developing long-term strategies for innovating responsibly. You will also learn to assess and measure the success of your RI initiatives through key performance indicators (KPIs).

This course covers the importance of embedding safety and other societal values in new product and service design from the outset. You will learn how to analyze ethical, legal and social impacts, deal with controversial or conflicting issues, organize effective stakeholder engagement, communicate your RI vision across the organization and overcome resistance when implementing your RI strategies.

The course offers best practices, tools and practical recommendations that you can use in your job to successfully drive innovation towards more socially responsible and profitable outcomes.

This MOOC is financially supported by the EU (grant agreement No 710059) and is a joint effort of TU Delft, Warwick University (UK), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), Netherlands National Institute for Public Health and Environment and the Italian Association for Industrial Research.

What you'll learn

• Develop a successful strategy for RI within your company
• Create commitment in internal and external stakeholder
• Embed a safety culture within your organization
• Implement a design-for-values approach
• Select the appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) for CSR and RI
• Promote ethical leadership