Thursday 27 June, 2019 saw the final meeting of the PRISMA project in Brussels, with Jonathan Hankins attending on behalf of the Bassetti Foundation.

Prisma is an almost completed European Union Horizon 2020 funded project whose aim was to develop a road mapping methodology for RRI in industry, based upon a series of freshly completed case studies carried out during the project. This conference was the opportunity to share the experience and findings with experts and stakeholders and to invite them to participate in a continuation of the project, with the aim of developing a broader roadmap for the implementation of RRI practices in industry across the EU.

The event opened with an introduction to the project followed by the first panel that featured Hilary Sutcliffe of Society Inside, Michael Liss of Thermo Fisher Scientific and Roberto Ferrigno of Novamont.

In this, the Sustainability and Innovation panel, issues of trust in governance were addressed, introduced by Hilary Sutcliffe who raised the issue asking how the earning of trust can be systematically incorporated into governance and regulation. The other panel members offered their experiences of implementing responsibility both in research and through their company’s CSR projects, highlighting not only progress and success but also some problems borne from different expectations between the various camps involved in their implimentation.

The morning continued with an address from Linden Farrer of the European Commission who described the Commission approach to RRI within the Horizon 2020 call for funding before explaining how the concepts involved within it will be carried on in the calls that will follow.

Tilna Ramstedt-Sen of the Council of the Tampere Region then took the floor to describe how the Tampere Regional Funding Council evaluate and promote RRI practices in projects and proposals within this particularly high-technology-based region.

Part 2 of the event was led by Andrea Porcari of Airi and the Prisma project who described the road map design and development process with a host of examples form the project and its case studies. Porcari showed several interesting slides that were also displayed as posters (see the photos below) that presented not only the roadmaps produced but also the methodology and questions that underpinned their creation.

The Round Table discussion that followed involved members of the consortium outlining their approaches with each participant addressing questions based upon their involvement: Commitment and leadership; context analysis; materiality; RRI actions in terms of experiment and engagement, key performance indicators and validation; and roadmap design. Each speaker addressed these issues via their experience of working within the project offering insight into the practicalities of carrying out such a project with industrial partners.

After lunch all participants were involved in a discussion session: Toward a consensus-based EU guidance to innovate responsibly. The concept for the forthcoming roadmap development workshop was first outlined before its aims were explained and discussed. This in itself threw up a lot of questions about scope and goal. Participants agreed to follow the work plan into 2020 with the aim of publishing a framework in 2020.

After brief concluding remarks the meeting was called to closure.

Jonathan Hankins will represent the Bassetti Foundation and participate throughout the workshop process and further results will be made available here upon release.

The Prisma RRI Roadmap can be downloaded here.
The case studies are available here.

Here some photos:

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