Challenges Facing Willing Firms

There is an increasing appetite for responsibility and accountability within the current corporate, however, it is not so clear how much accountability can be given away before the conversation returns to traditional definitions of corporate profit and shareholder value. This chapter explores the fundamental challenges which firms seeking to incorporate socially accountable models into their business approach face in the current pro-market economic system. Four subthemes will be elaborated upon: corporate responsibility in the climate of intangible capital; the stakeholder-shareholder dichotomy; the [in]compatible coexistence of economic growth, innovation and public accountability; and possibilities revealed by benefit corporations. It concludes by examining ways in which both social accountability and profit maximisation might simultaneously exist through an RS approach which can work even within this current lay-out, and how this reveals the more systemic adjustments needed to support widespread change

Putting Responsibility Centre Stage: The Underlying Values of Responsible Stagnation

This chapter shows how the concept of ‘responsible stagnation’ opens up a new way of looking at some of the problems with markets, GDP growth and innovation systems as they currently stand. It discusses the concept of ‘stagnation’ and why it provokes such fear on the part of policymakers and politicians, before examining the normative values of Responsible Stagnation and how ‘responsibility’ might be imagined in this setting. It considers the value of slowed reasoning in better decision-making, and innovating from an ethics of care. The chapter closes with a discussion on RS as a particular configuration of change, both social and material, that places responsibility centre-stage and offers its own set of priorities, regardless of their contribution to GDP.

Challenges to the Story of Innovation

This chapter sets out the meanings attached to the concept of ‘innovation’ and asks how it has recently come to occupy the political and economic position it now holds. Drawing from science and technology studies, which has long sought to better incorporate the public in technological decision-making, it explores the impetus towards connecting ‘responsibility’ with ‘innovation’ and the context from which this derives. Finally, it examines how this impetus has become incorporated into various frameworks for Responsible (Research and) Innovation, and what is missing from this approach in terms of understanding the place of ‘innovation’ in the present political economy, and the place of politics in innovation.

Conclusion: The Scope of Responsible Stagnation

Our final chapter reaffirms how 'responsible stagnation' (RS) can incorporate a different set of values and measures into an a-growth understanding of innovation. It argues for greater circulation of novel ideas to help mitigate the environmental and social damage inevitable if we continue to prioritize GDP-measured growth and suggests that many of these are already in the system. Rather than creating an impediment to the quest for progress, the chapter demonstrates how RS, as an integral component of responsible innovation and not its antithesis, provides a framing mechanism through which assumptions about growth can be made visible and questioned. This opens possibilities for innovation directed at achieving social, ecological and economic equilibrium and for reducing input rather than always seeking to produce more. It concludes by examining the part that both innovation and stagnation will have to play in the transition to a more sustainable, more socially equitable society.

Introducing Responsible Stagnation as the ‘Fourth Quadrant’

In this chapter we introduce the central problem of innovation in a slow-growth economy, which is a tendency to prioritize economic returns over other values, and to downplay or ignore ecological limitations. Drawing from established but alternative economic theories, we suggest that the unexamined fourth quadrant of the innovation matrix, responsible stagnation (RS), provides an opportunity to also consider how innovation outside the market is pointing to more viable ways of sustaining social progress, particularly in developed economies which have passed their productivity peak. The introduction defines these concepts and concludes by introducing RS as a particular configuration of change in which ethics matters and the priorities are restraint, living gently, and the uptake and embedding of new ideas and novel ways of doing things better, regardless of their contribution to GDP.

The Plurality of Technology and Innovation in the Global South

This chapter discuss the implications of Responsible Innovation for the Global South. It highlights the complexity and challenges of innovation in the Global South, drawing on the reflections of anthropologists and post-colonial scholars to consider how responsibility (beyond growth) and RI might be relevant to countries in the Global South, without repeating the patterns of colonization which are contrary to RS’s underlying ethos of care approached to make these concepts. The chapter argues that, being the idea of innovation predominantly a fruit of Western thinking, its application (or imposition) to the Global South is likely to raise conflicts and contestation. The authors conclude the chapter with a call to embrace epistemic plurality and an ethic of care in approaching RS in the Global South.

The Problem with Markets

This chapter explores why market-based policies, promoted under the prevailing global paradigm of “economic liberalism”, are not sufficient in and of themselves to facilitate human wellbeing in a stagnant world economy. It describes how, in theory, markets deliver efficient allocations of private (commodified) goods and services, yet in practice the conditions for this efficiency are seldom met.

Innovation for Social Needs

In this chapter we explore in more detail the kinds of already-existing types of innovation which fulfil the criteria of restraint, living gently, and paying serious attention to the ethics involved in collective circulation of seemingly beneficial innovation. We draw here upon examples from both over- and under-consuming nations, and from economies in crisis as well as those which presently appear to be more stable. We make the claim that innovation needs to be viewed more broadly than traditional, Schumpeterian definitions that have become obsolete due to their inability to embrace and acknowledge social relations, as well as social, environmental and ethical responsibility in the process of innovation.