Responsible innovation: moving towards a culturally sensitive approach

Responsible Innovation (RI) recently emerged as an approach that addresses issues related to major social and environmental risks and uncertainties in complex innovations. At this stage, more inquiry is still needed to make the RI approach more contextual and to facilitate its applicability in practice, especially in different cultural settings. To address this issue, we propose a conceptual framework based on Hofstede’s dimensions of national culture and core processes of RI. We argue that the cultural dimensions are likely to play distinct roles in influencing these RI processes—how they would be interpreted and operationalized in practice in different societies with different cultures. Ultimately, the paper emphasizes the importance of evolving a broader, more comprehensive and mature approach to RI which takes cultural aspects explicitly into account.