Health research and innovation is crucial for maintaining and improving European public health. In this context, it is easy to acknowledge that science is not separate from society but part of it, which confers an important social responsibility on science.
Implementing and developing Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is a key action of the ERA4Health Partnership objectives and a way we as funders take responsibility. RRI actions will be promoted via integrated actions such as
- to promote cross-cutting training of relevant stakeholders and institutional change
- to develop the ERA4Health RRI Guidelines
The goal is to foster the uptake of the RRI approach by stakeholders and institutions
The ERA4Health RRI Guidelines
During 2023 ERA4Health developed its first Guidelines for RRI in a co-creative manner involving advisory board members, evaluators, scientists and funders of ERA4Health. ERA4Health Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) Guidelines.
These guidelines
- introduce the idea of Responsible Research & Innovation (RRI)
- explain how ERA4Health approaches and supports RRI
- offer practical advice for operationalising RRI in projects and how it can be evaluated and
- provide sources of further information for applicants
This document should help
- applicants to ERA4Health calls
- evaluators of proposals submitted to ERA4Health calls
- funding organisations
In sum RRI provides a framework to ask how research and innovation should be carried out to ensure that we achieve the societal goals of research and innovation in an open and inclusive way. ERA4Health believes that the RRI methodology improves the quality of research proposals and projects. The RRI Guidelines are thus an integrated part of the call texts in our two upcoming Joint Transnational Calls NutriBrain (JTC3) and NANOTECMEC (JTC4).
ERA4Health hopes the RRI Guidelines document will also help you to prepare proposals for other health science programmes that include RRI-related aspects, for instance Horizon Europe.
This is a ‘live document’ that will be further developed by ERA4Health in cooperation with RRI advisors, health scientists and funding organisations.
Contact person for RRI is Cecilie A. Mathiesen at The Research Council of Norway (cam@rcn.no).
Web resources for including RRI in your project
www.rri-tools.eu provide numerous resources for practical RRI.
https://thinkingtool.eu/: The Societal Readiness Thinking Tool guides you through the steps of including RRI in a project.
The Centre for Digital Life Norway has also compiled a range of resources that may help develop your approach.
Tools for public engagement: https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/resources and http://actioncatalogue.eu/ ERA4HEALTH’s approach to RRI builds on previous frameworks published by the UK’s EPSRC-UKRI, the Research Council of Norway, the European Commission and funding programmes such as M-ERA.NET3, ERA CoBioTech and EuroNanoMed3