Responsible innovaton (RI) means understanding the potential ethical implications of one's work including both societal and environmental impacts and both the outcomes and the process by which it is performed. For example, you may be developing a new system for a charity (ethically good outcome), but not think about the impact on the participants of the initial prototype when it is closed down. The impacts may also be indirect or future for example, developing systems to improve urban traffic flow might have short term postive impacts, but lead to more car use in the longer term. These issues apply both the product deelopment and reesearch. For the latter one often has to imagine the longer term trajectory of the research -- the UK research funding agency EPSRC have developed the AREA framework to help researchers in the RI process.
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