Thank you for your interest in the Jong-MVI conference. This conference is closed for registration, there are no seats available.

On Monday April 8, 2019 Jong-MVI will organize a one-day conference on ‘Responsible Innovation: the Challenge of Ambiguity’ especially for early-career researchers working in the field of responsible innovation.

The Jong-MVI conference will revolve around the theme of ambiguity and will include a keynote by Phil Macnaghten, possibilities to introduce your research through 2-minutes ‘speedtalks’, and a session in which we exchange experiences in and challenges of how to study responsible innovation and explore possible approaches.

The program is as follows:

‘Jong-MVI’ is a NWO committee with and for early-career researchers in responsible innovation. We provide advice to the NWO program committee for MVI (https://www.nwo-mvi.nl/), serve as ambassadors for the MVI approach, and want to engage young researchers working on responsible innovation. In this context we will organize a one-day conference early next year for young researchers working in the field of responsible innovation.

Technological innovations invariably raise questions about their ethical and societal consequences. NWO-MVI research identifies the ethical and societal aspects of technological innovations at an early stage so that these can be taken into account in the design process. The result: responsible innovations that enjoy broad societal consensus.

If only it were so easy!

In practice, actors often diverge in the meanings that they attribute to the technological innovation in question, in the problem that they think is most urgent, and in the solution that they think can best solve it. While one group may think a renewable energy technology is important for its contribution to sustainability, others may instead worry about its consequences for historical landscapes. While one group may value a new agricultural technology for its contribution to food security, others may worry about the ways such technologies can deepen unequal relationships between large corporations and small farmers. In other words: people may have diverging views about what constitutes a desirable outcome, different languages for articulating their concerns, and conflicting criteria for deciding when a technology is responsible.

Researchers in responsible innovation are invariably confronted with such ambiguity. As MVI researchers, this raises the question how we deal with this. How do we accommodate this ambiguity in our research process? How do we deal with differences in the languages that are spoken and the values that are prioritized? How do theories, methods, and project structures both enable and constrain this? And what stance do we take ourselves as researchers?

This is the central theme to the first event for young researchers in responsible innovation, organized by Jong Maatschappelijk Verantwoord Innoveren (Jong-MVI). This day aims to bring together young researchers in responsible innovation projects.

As part of this day, we would like to organize a session in which researchers from different projects engage with this topic in an interactive manner.