Stakeholders in Research and Innovation: Towards Responsible Governance

The concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) revolves around stakeholders of research and innovation aiming for societal desirability of the innovation process. In practice, it is often not clear, however, why one instead of another stakeholder-(group) is invited and for which purpose (Repo and Matschoss 2019). In most of the RRI discourse, ‘stakeholders’ are used as a catchall phrase denoting societal actors without actually pointing to who they are, why their participation is important, what exactly they contribute and why they should be involved in the R & I processes. In the case of citizen engagement, a typical bias emerges around the inclusion of easily accessible groups of publics. In this chapter we look at stakeholder theory as it has been developed and used for strategic business purposes from the mid 80’s and suggest how stakeholder theory may be combined with RRI, RI and QH approaches and applied to research and innovation. We argue that moral, epistemic and power diversity and balance is key to a stakeholder theory of RRI in order to facilitate a democratic debate amongst a wide group of stakeholders in a specific R & I endeavor in order to arrive at outcomes that are appropriate, legitimate, and desirable.