Over the past decade, the debate on responsible innovation has highlighted the importance of anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion, and responsiveness in innovation processes, and it has informed governance frameworks and practices across science, technology, and policy domains. At the same time, the challenges of complex transformations—such as those currently reshaping health, food, transport and other systems — raise new questions for innovation governance and practice. 

Transformations are inherently open-ended, involve diverse and frequently contested pathways for change, entail interactions across multiple institutions, scales and sectors, and among multiple stakeholders with competing values, interests, and power relations. In these contexts, the existing RI framework may not fully capture the kinds of responsibilities at stake. For instance, attending to issues of direction and directionality is one possible avenue, but there may be other ways in which notions of responsibility need to be redefined in light of long-term, uncertain, and contested transformations. This session invites theoretical, empirical and methodological contributions that engage with these challenges and open up new ways of thinking about what responsible innovation could mean in times of transformation.

We particularly encourage submissions that:

• Connect or bridge perspectives from responsible innovation and research on socio-technical transitions or transformations
• Examine the role of responsible innovation in shaping change within health, food, and transport systems, or across these and other sectors
• Explore how responsibility might be redefined—whether by attending to directionality, rethinking who carries responsibility, or reconsidering its temporal, spatial, or institutional dimensions
• Provide empirical case studies that illustrate how responsible innovation is practiced in transformative contexts
• Offer theoretical or methodological reflections on the relationship between responsibility and systemic change

We welcome theoretical, empirical, and practice-oriented contributions from across disciplines. Interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral perspectives are particularly encouraged.

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