Overview

Methodology

PRO-Ethics aims to shape ethical conduct in publicly funded innovation activities with a special focus on the direct engagement of non-traditional stakeholders. These non-traditional stakeholders include citizens, public and semi-public caretakers, NGOs, and social entrepreneurs. The eight research funding organisations (RFOs) partnering in PRO-Ethics and the analytical partners will jointly develop a comprehensive but practical innovation ethics framework. The implementation of this framework will be supported by a set of guidelines with the goal of achieving a fair interaction with non-traditional stakeholders in innovation projects and activities. To this end, the needs, requirements, and values of non-traditional actors will be gathered through participatory processes and systematised to better and more effectively engage them in innovation processes.

To achieve this, PRO-Ethics works with Pilot Cases, which are divided into two phases. In Pilot Phase I, existing participative programs and processes of four involved RFOs are analysed based on a common set of questions. The involved research funding organisations, with the help of the analytical partners, reflect on and gather learnings from these first experiments, which feed into a training to prepare and implement new pilots in Pilot Phase II. Through this iterative methodology, PRO-Ethics creates guidelines and assessment tools close to the actual praxes and experiences of research funders, which are in turn tested to achieve quantifiable results.