Responsible Innovation: Moving Towards a Culturally Sensitive Approach

Abstract

Responsible Innovation (RI) recently emerged as an approach that addresses issues related to major social and
environmental risks and uncertainties in complex innovations. At this stage, more inquiry is still needed to make the
Western-rooted RI approach more contextual and to facilitate its applicability in practice, especially in other cultural
settings. To address this issue, we propose a conceptual framework based on Hofstede’s dimensions of national
culture and core processes of RI. We argue that the cultural dimensions are likely to play distinct roles in influencing
how these RI processes would be interpreted and operationalised in different societies with different cultures,
illustrating this with some examples from Asian countries. Ultimately, the paper emphasises the importance of
evolving a broader, more comprehensive and mature approach to RI that takes cultural aspects explicitly into
account.