“Sapere, fare, potere, Verso un’innovazione responsabile” is the title of the volume, edited by Massimiano Bucchi and published by Rubbettino, that brings together the lectures organised by the Giannino Bassetti Foundation (FGB) between 2002 and 2005.
The volume contains the papers by US bioethicist Daniel Callahan, French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour and Columbia University economist Richard Nelson, with a foreword by Piero Bassetti and a postscript by Cristina Grasseni.
Callahan, Latour and Nelson were asked to discuss the issue of innovation and its social, political and cultural implications, and hence that of responsibility. The three lectures broach the topics closest to those on which the Giannino Bassetti Foundation focuses and are fully in line with its mission: to invite eminent academics, and policymakers, entrepreneurs, innovators, consumers and members of the public as well, to consider the possibility of the interplay between innovation and responsibility not being a zero-sum game in which “more responsibility” necessarily equates to “less innovation” and vice versa, and in which knowledge and capability demarcate and repel each other. The alternative held out by the FGB to irresponsible innovation is innovation that has the courage and maturity to ponder its profound meaning and end purposes in earnest instead of pursuing an ideal of unlimited progress that threatens to prove economically and socially unsustainable.

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