Beyond Innovation: Defining, Measuring and Enabling Responsible Agri-Food Innovation
Dr. Dagmara Weckowska
Innovation Management | Freie Universität Berlin
Food systems today face mounting challenges—from climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource constraints to health issues, shifting consumer demands, and questions of equity and social justice. This raises urgent debates about how to transform food production, distribution, and consumption toward more sustainable and just futures. Innovations play a central role in shaping food systems transformations, yet their trajectories are neither neutral nor predetermined, requiring critical reflection on responsibility and direction.
We encourage submissions that go beyond the idea of innovation as inherently good or desirable. This may include studies that explore how agri-food innovations align with societal norms and values, define responsible innovation (RI) in specific empirical agri-food settings, develop methods to assess or measure RI, or investigate tools or governance frameworks that enable and support responsibility in practice.
We are particularly interested in studies of responsible innovation in the context of protein transitions—the shift from conventional animal-based proteins toward more alternative protein sources, including plant-based, fungi-based, cultivated (cell-based), among others.
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