RRIL - Presentation of the course: Public engagement

Responsible Research & Innovation is a genius concept developed by the European Commission for the governance of research and innovation processes with a view on the (ethical) acceptability, sustainability and societal desirability of the innovation process and its marketable products. It aims to shape, maintain, develop, coordinate and align existing and novel research and innovation-related processes, actors and responsibilities with a view to ensuring desirable and acceptable research outcomes. In the Horizon 2020 programmes, there were and are some projects focusing on related training needs. But there is no substantial attempt observable to develop continuous higher education programmes supporting the implementation of this concept and the respective reorganisation processes in universities, research centres, research and innovation oriented enterprises and public authorities like cities or regional governments. This project pretends to fulfil this gap through the co-creation of higher education modules between different research and innovation actors. RRIL especially focus on public engagement, gender equality and ethics (in the knowledge fields Energy and Economy) testing the learning modules in innovative environments based on interactive real-problem approaches. The modules developed are offered to research and innovation actors supporting the implementation of RRI principles in the organisations capacitating the learners to develop jointly innovative solution for societal problems. RRIL is based on co-creation and open innovation processes giving a prominent role to the learners. The co-creation is conceived as multidisciplinary and transversal among different kinds of actors as HEI, research centres, NGO’s and cities paving the way for knowledge exchange between them. It consists in informed learning among practitioners considering learners as a knowledgeable and critical partners in designing and implementation of the learning means. Under this perspective, the potential learners – programme coordinators and tutors - are considered peers working collaboratively on the project output