Designing Responsible Innovation Ecosystems for the Mobilisation of Resources from Business and Finance to Accelerate the Implementation of Sustainability. A View from Industry

The idea of Responsible Innovation, which deals with delivering economic profit and sustainable value to all stakeholders, is gaining wider acceptance as innovation is seen as a holistic process of delivering impacts valued by all stakeholders, i.e., society, users/consumers, and shareholders. Implementing the idea of Responsible Innovation requires an anticipation of the expectations of, and impact on, all stakeholders, the trends in regulation, and an ability to integrate continuously the latest scientific findings. Due to the financially risky nature of the innovation process, industry as the main provider of innovation must play an active and leading role that must be balanced with its fiduciary duties. Implementing Responsible Innovations is therefore a collaborative process between industry, government, academia and society, each playing a critical role in upholding the “4 gears” of an innovation ecosystem that we present here for discussion. The learnings from the failure to fight climate change and from game theory can be used to design such an ecosystem that embeds the necessary incentives to attract innovators and investors motivated to act responsibly. In this perspective paper, we present the views from innovation practitioners from industry on the different elements and typical present shortcomings of such an innovation ecosystem and we make proposals that should be addressed in order to generate innovations that truly deliver benefits to all stakeholders and train the innovation managers that will enable them.