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About the UCL Centre for Responsible Innovation
We think that research and innovation can contribute to a flourishing society and healthy planet. However, new technologies bring problems as well as solutions, and today the benefits and risks of innovation are unevenly spread.
This raises profound questions and urgent challenges. Take, for instance artificial intelligence, where new alliances of firms and governments are rushing to deploy technological solutions to long-standing social, economic and environmental problems without first establishing license to operate in society. This approach risks worsening inequalities and excluding people from decision-making processes that impact everyone.
Responsible innovation is a way of organising research and innovation, so it addresses these kinds of issues. It does so by understanding the social and political dynamics between science and society - sometimes framed as issues of safety, security, sustainability, trustworthiness, ethics, justice or simply democracy.
The UCL Centre for Responsible Innovation was established in 2025 to take on these challenges. We do that through research, capacity building and consultancy. We provide a space for scholars to systematically identify tensions between innovation and responsibility, and to engage with the values, needs and visions of the public. We empower scientists, technologists and innovators to embrace their responsibilities to societies. We do this through active engagement with scientists and technologists to build responsibility, reversibility and democracy into innovation systems. We work with decision makers across policy and civil society.
We are based at UCL's Department of Science and Technology Studies where for over a decade we have contributed pioneering studies and teaching to this maturing field. Bringing together traditions from social, historical and philosophical studies of innovation we are interested in responsible innovation as collective care for the future through stewardship of innovation in the present. We help show that the future of innovation is not inevitable – it can be imagined differently.
Centre staff lead and contribute to ambitious national and global research and policy collaborations. We are helping to establish at UCL a research environment and culture that supports impact and engagement within the university and across society. We provide teaching and training that builds capacity for practicing responsible innovation across the UK research landscape as well as in public sectors and industry
Centre staff, associates and advisors connect these activities to a global network of experts in innovation governance, responsibility and democracy. If you'd like to be a part of this work, please get in touch.
