Abstract:
The way in which responsible innovation (RI) is interpreted and implemented depends to a significant degree on how the researchers, scholars and practitioners who work on RI see their own work. There have been several contributions to the RI discourse suggesting distinctive roles that RI researchers may adopt. In this article we present the findings of an empirical study of roles of RI researchers in research projects based on an online survey collecting both quantitative and qualitative data on the roles that RI researchers assume. Its findings confirm that RI researchers assume some of the roles described in the literature. However, the data shows that some of the roles from the literature were not adopted and there were several additional roles not part of the literature. We propose a model that will allow for more detailed research on the factors that influence role choices of researchers.