Governing beyond the project:
Refocusing innovation governance in emerging science and technology funding

This presentation reviews results of a recent publication on innovation governance in the context of “responsible innovation.” I will discuss ways this idiom of governance was enacted in practice, how this shaped innovation processes, and what aspects of innovation were left untouched. Within this idiom, funders typically focus on one point in an innovation system: researchers in projects. However, the more transformational aspirations of responsible innovation are circumscribed by this context. Adopting a mode of critique that assembles, this talk considers some alternative approaches to governing the shared trajectories of science, technology, and society. Using the idea of institutional invention to focus innovation governance on four inflection points—agendas, calls, spaces, evaluation—would allow funding organizations and researchers to look ‘beyond the project’, developing new methods to unpack and reflect on assumed purposes of science, technology, and innovation, and to potentially reconfigure the institutions that condition scientific practice.

Michael Bernstein is a researcher at the Center for Innovation Systems & Policy at AIT (Austrian Institute of Technology), Vienna.

Lecture is part of the Science Policy Working Group at IHS.

Register for the event: hoenigmayer@ihs.ac.at