Overview

Methodology

PRO-Ethics aimed to shape ethical conduct in publicly funded research and innovation activities with a special focus on the direct engagement of non-traditional stakeholders. Such non-traditional stakeholders may include citizens in the broadest sense, (end)-users of a technology, residents of an area, people affected by an issue, entrepreneurs, project beneficiaries, CSOs, NGOs, social entrepreneurs, and so on.

The eight research funding organizations (RFOs) contributing to PRO-Ethics developed and implemented a total of 8 pilot cases that allowed them to trial and learn from stakeholder engagement activities within their own organizations. These pilots gave them hands-on experience and a deep understanding of the complexities involved when planning, implementing and evaluating participatory processes. In conversation with the technical project partners, their learnings were an important pillar in the development of our Ethics Framework and Guidelines .

Overall, the pilots were divided into two phases. In pilot phase I, existing participatory programs and processes of four RFO partners were analyzed based on a common set of questions. Supported by the analytical partners, the involved RFO partners reflected on and gathered learnings from these first experiments, which served as a basis for the first draft of the ethics framework, but also for the preparation and implementation of the second phase pilots. Through this iterative methodology, PRO-Ethics created guidelines and assessment tools close to the actual practice and experiences of research funders, while systematizing and integrating the needs, requirements, and values of non-traditional actors.

The following section gives an overview of the pilots and the main learnings extracted from them.