Responsible Innovation in Industry: The Role of Firm’s Multi-Stakeholder Network

Responsible innovation (RI) receives a high interest from the society; however, its practical implementation remains complicated because of the lack of operationalisation that would allow integrating RI into existing organisational processes, especially, in industrial contexts. Most prior research on RI in the industry seek to move forward firm’s innovation policies and strategies to include RI principles. They are, however, limited to include firm’ behavioural choices and institutional requirements in their analysis. In an integrative view, a multi-stakeholder network approach to reveal how firm’s multi-stakeholder network shapes responsible innovation practices throughout the different stages of the innovation process of the firm is applied. Data from ten case studies are used to validate different levels of responsibility, through engagement with the firm’s multi-stakeholder network. Based on that, a new conceptualisation of the RI is proposed, consisting of two levels: first level defined by legal and contractual responsibilities and the second level defined by moral responsibilities.