CSIRO’s global role in responsible research and innovation

February 19th, 2021

Justine Lacey discusses Australia's responsible innovation engagement and uptake with Co-Change.

19 February 2021

In September 2020, CSIRO’s Responsible Innovation FSP Lead, Justine Lacey, was invited to join the international advisory board of the CO-CHANGE project. As part of her role, she participates in discussions about projects that are promoting collaborative engagement with citizens and organisations that are often not directly involved in processes for responsibility in innovation.

What is the CO-CHANGE Project?

Led by Dr Peter Biegelbauer at the Austrian Institute of Technology, the European CO-CHANGE project seeks the expertise of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) researchers and practitioners from across the European research and innovation system. This expertise supports ethical and responsible research and innovation in the areas of citizen engagement, science education, gender equality, research ethics and open access. The project draws on the established pillars of RRI to think deliberately about how innovation is conducted by coalitions of actors. The aims are to:

  • initiate and implement institutional-scale changes in RRI, and
  • build transformative capacity and leadership in RRI.

The consortium partners include an impressive array of research funding and implementing agencies and firms, including the Austrian Institute of Technology (Austria), the Council of Tampere Region (Finland), ESSRG (Hungary), TECNALIA (Spain), TU Delft (The Netherlands), the University of Novi Sad (Serbia), the Vienna Science & Technology Fund WWTF (Austria) and VTT (Finland). Government, industry, and civil society are also involved in the project through citizen engagement measures, participation in workshops, and via advisory board and sounding board representation.

The state of RRI in Australia

Prompted by her recent connection with the CO-CHANGE Project advisory board, Justine was interviewed about responsible innovation in Australia by Éva Bánsági of the Environmental Social Science Research Group (ESSRG).

“The opportunity to engage with our global peers on responsible innovation, and to learn from and share our experiences is invaluable for benchmarking our progress here in Australia and advancing the field globally”, said Justine.

“It is particularly exciting to see how the consortium partners are adopting a novel and experimental approach to achieving institutional change through their CO-CHANGE Labs where RRI knowledge and interventions are being co-created and tested with end users.”

Justine’s interview is available on the CO-CHANGE website.

For more news and updates on the CO-CHANGE Project, please visit CO-CHANGE (cochangeproject.eu).