Erik Fisher

• Professor (Associate) at Arizona State University

To put frameworks of Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation (R(R)I) into practice, engagement methods have been developed to study and enhance technoscientific experts’ capacities to reflexively address value considerations in their work. These methods commonly rely on engagement between technoscientific experts and social s...

Over the past 50 years, policy makers have sought to shape new and emerging technologies in light of societal risks, public values, and ethical concerns. While much of this work has taken place during “upstream” research prioritization and “downstream” technology regulation, the actual “midstream” work of engineers and other technical experts has i...

Digitalization, a dominant megatrend in today's global world, offers numerous intriguing technological possibilities. Out of these novelties, self-driving cars have rapidly come to be a primary focus; the literature categorizes them as a radical innovation due to the possibility that the mass adoption of self-driving cars would not only radically c...

Reports from integrative researchers who have followed calls for socio- technical integration emphasize that the potential of interdisciplinary col- laboration to inflect the social shaping of technoscience is often constrained by their liminal position. Integrative researchers tend to be positioned as either adversarial outsiders or co-opted insid...

By embracing the performative logic of technoscience, state policy makers are reimagining the relations among science, technology and society, in the process creating both practical and symbolic shifts in governance. These shifts—including possibilities for more deliberative and interactive roles for scientists, social scientists, and public citize...

Precision/personalized medicine is a hot topic in health care. Often presented with the motto ''the right drug, for the right patient, at the right dose, and the right time,'' precision medicine is a theory for rational therapeutics as well as practice to individualize health interventions (e.g., drugs, food, vaccines, medical devices, and exercise...

Precision/personalized medicine is a hot topic in health care. Often presented with the motto ''the right drug, for the right patient, at the right dose, and the right time,'' precision medicine is a theory for rational therapeutics as well as practice to individualize health interventions (e.g., drugs, food, vaccines, medical devices, and exercise...

Across the globe, research, development, and innovation (RDI) processes are operating at increasingly accelerated paces, promising rapid development and higher standards of living, but also increasing the likelihood of unintended, socially undesirable effects that inevitably attend progress. The notion of responsible research and innovation (RRI) h...

Increased funding of nanotechnology research in the USA at the turn of the millennium was paired with a legislative commitment to and a novel societal research policy for the responsible development of nanotechnology. Innovative policy discourses at the time suggested that such work could engage a variety of publics, stakeholders, and researchers t...

This chapter argues that it is inappropriate to use the term “interactional expertise” in the context of laboratory ethnographies and engagement studies, such as the Socio-technical Integration Research (STIR) Project, where “embedded humanists,” who are not experts in laboratory science, use approaches from the social sciences and humanities to en...

A critical exploration of today's global imperative to innovate, by champions, critics, and reformers of innovation. Corporate executives, politicians, and school board leaders agree—Americans must innovate. Innovation experts fuel this demand with books and services that instruct aspiring innovators in best practices, personal habits, and workplac...

Despite Federal directives calling for an integrated approach to strengthening the resilience of critical infrastructure systems, little is known about the relationship between human behavior and infrastructure resilience. While it is well recognized that human response can either amplify or mitigate catastrophe, the role of human or psychological...

Requirements to integrate societal considerations into research and development practices began appearing throughout the democratic industrialized world in the early 2000s and eventually became a central feature of responsible innovation. Examining one of the earliest and most prominent policy examples, this paper investigates the conceptual basis...

This paper looks at the creation of a network of researchers of social issues in nanotechnology and the role of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU) in the creation of this network. The extent to which CNS-ASU is associated with the development of a research network around the study of social issues in nano...

Discourses surrounding the design, development, and implementation of contemporary energy innovations variously promise to enhance the reliability of the energy grid, incorporate renewable energy, enable low-carbon transitions, and lead to greater convenience and lower costs for customers. Such wide-ranging visions are constructed and reinforced by...

While technological innovation is a core element of efforts to increase public welfare, innovators are rarely trained to take the societal dimensions of innovation into account in a systematic manner. Responsible innovation has emerged within policy discourses worldwide to address this challenge. Implementing responsible innovation in daily practic...

Recently, the notion of responsible research and innovation (RRI) has been gaining momentum in policy and practice. The main claim of RRI is that social, ethical and environmental aspects should be taken into consideration in scientific research and innovation activities. Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR) is one of the first tools emergin...

Since the first electrification systems were established in the United States between 1910 and 1930, energy systems governance at the municipal level has included competing visions for how engineering design and energy policy-making should foster particular social outcomes. Using Phoenix as a representative metropolitan area, and the cases of distr...

Responsible innovation requires that scientific and other expert practices be responsive to society. We take stock of various collaborative approaches to socio-technical integration that seek to broaden the societal contexts technical experts take into account during their routine activities. Part of a larger family of engaged scholarship that incl...

This symposium report compiles presentations on responsible research and innovation by leading researchers from the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom as well as presentations on the current status of research misconduct and biomedical ethics by Japanese researchers and practitioners.

Collaborations between natural and social scientists are difficult enough to achieve; evaluating them in terms of responsible innovation is even more daunting. This talk suggests such collaborations should be mutually responsive to diverse problem definitions and balance critical reflection with enhanced creativity. It presents results from socio-t...

Enhancing the responsiveness of science and innovation programs to societal values is a critical element of responsible innovation. Distinct from laboratory-level research into socio-technical integration, this paper focuses on integration and responsiveness at the level of research priority setting. Taking the case of nanotechnology, it evaluates...

Midstream modulation is a framework for relating changes in research and innovation to changes in practitioners’ contextual awareness. It is used by the socio-technical integration research (STIR) program to help elucidate and enhance the capacities of laboratory practitioners to participate more deliberately in the governance of science, technolog...

Systematic convergence in knowledge and technology promises to increase the rate of scientific breakthroughs, lead to the establishment of new S&T domains and support growing expectations for human progress, including improved productivity, education, and quality of life. A virtual spiral of creativity and innovation will have a significant effect...

2.1 Introduction Few would disagree that science and innovation should be undertaken responsibly. "Responsible innovation" intuitively feels right in sentiment, as an ideal or aspiration. It has positive, constructive overtones, where science and innovation are directed at, and undertaken towards, socially desirable and socially acceptable ends, wi...

This chapter discusses initiatives in the field of "Responsible Innovation" (RI) at different levels and some of their dynamics. Then it focuses on two types of intervention-oriented activities that concretely support and stimulate aspirations for RI/Responsible Research and Innovation" (RRI): socio-technical integration research (STIR) and constru...

Theranostics signals the integrated application of molecular diagnostics, therapeutic treatment and patient response monitoring. Such integration has hitherto neglected another crucial dimension: coproduction of theranostic scientific knowledge, novel technological development and broader sociopolitical systems whose boundaries are highly porous. N...

Research policies in the United States and the European Union have shown increasing eagerness in the last two decades to incorporate insights from publics and the human and social sciences into natural science and engineering research, while Chinese research policies devote relatively little attention to socio-technical integration. The ELSI (Ethic...

Science policy mandates across the industrialized world insinuate more active roles for publics, their earlier participation in policy decisions, and expanded notions of science and technology governance. In response to these policies, engaged scholars in science studies have sought to design and conduct exercises aimed at better attuning science t...

Prepared by the GSEAC Subcommittee on Pathways to Integration for Genome British Columbia

Legislation is a form of governance that directs attention and prescribes action. Within the domain of nanoscience, the US 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act contains mandates not only for rapid development for economic competitiveness but also for responsible implementation, which is required to take place by integrating soci...

This chapter discusses the development of two interdisciplinary trading zones in which the authors participated: (1) An initial year in which they developed the notion of “humanistic engineering” in the University of Colorado at Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science; and (2) a thirty-three-month period in which one of the authors fun...

Science and innovation policy (SIP) is typically justified in terms of public values while SIP program assessments are typically limited to economic terms that imperfectly take into account these values. The study of public values through public value mapping (PVM) lacks widely-accepted methods for systematically identifying value structures within...

Taking up the notion of engineering as social experimentation, this paper argues that engineering research laboratory directors have a responsibility to inform graduate engineering students who participate in their research projects of the potential broader social dimensions of those projects. Informing engineers-in-the-making of the broader social...

EMBO reports encourages and publishes articles that report novel findings of wide biological significance in the areas of development, immunology, neuroscience, plant biology, structural biology, genomic & computational biology, genome stability & dynamics, chromatin & transcription, RNA, proteins, cellular metabolism, signal transduction, cell cyc...

The ideas and imagery about the future that characterize nanotechnology today are shaped by multiple values and agendas which influence public investments,business strategies, infrastructure design, and public debate. Presenting Futures highlights a variety of ways that nanotechnology actors think about and seek to shape the future. It brings toget...

This chapter reviews the role ethical and societal issues associated with nanotechnology have played in the development of national, and particularly US nanotechnology policies. The prominence of nanotechnology as a matter of national policy is significant, as is the attention being afforded to ethical and societal considerations. Notably, there is...

In an attempt to shape the development of nanotechnologies, ethics policy programs promote engagement in the hope of broadening the scope of considerations that scientists and engineers take into account. While enhancing the reflexivity of scientists theoretically implies changes in technoscientific practice, few empirical studies demonstrate such...

Public “upstream engagement” and other approaches to the social control of technology are currently receiving international attention in policy discourses around emerging technologies such as nanotechnology. To the extent that such approaches hold implications for research and development (R&D) activities, the distinct participation of scientists a...

This paper argues that the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development (R&D) Act embodies an unresolved tension between two policy trends that pose a growing dilemma for future science and technology (S&T) policy makers: the imperative towards rapid technological implementation; and mounting pressure to conduct technology development with...

No clear implementation methods exist for US legislation on integrating societal considerations into nanotechnology research and development. An empirical study was thus undertaken to investigate the possibility and utility of "sociotechnical integration" during nanoscale engineering research in an academic setting. For twelve weeks, an "embedded h...

This paper considers federal requirements to institute a research program on societal and ethical considerations of nanotechnology, and to integrate the results of this research with nanotechnology research and development. It identifies research selection and assessment criteria derived in part from criticism of the Human Genome Project's Ethical,...

It would be folly to set up a program under which research in the natural sciences and medicine was expanded at the cost of the social sciences, humanities, and other studies so essential to national well-being. Vannevar Bush, Science-The Endless Frontier (1945) The relationship between science and society today is a troubled one. The first, more a...

The task of reforming the engineering education system to improve graduates' writing skills, while justified, faces significant barriers. The College of Engineering and Applied Science's online writing lab (OWL) at the University of Colorado-Boulder is a unique and promising effort that helps overcome such barriers. Rather than rely on the impracti...

The increasing complexity of societal issues, environmental considerations, and technological progress means that engineers are being asked to make decisions that not only require technical expertise but also a keen understanding of broad, socio-humanistic contexts and considerations. However, the engineering curriculum in most academic institution...

Our own favorite description of what engineers do is "design under constraint." Engineering is creativity constrained by nature, by cost, by concerns of safety, environmental impact, ergonomics, reliability, manufacturability, maintainability—the whole long list of such "ilities." To be sure, the realities of nature is one of the constraint sets we...

No clear implementation methods exist for US legislation on integrating societal considerations into nanotechnology research and development. An empirical study was thus undertaken to investigate the possibility and utility of "socio-technical integration" during nanoscale engineering research in an academic setting. For twelve weeks, an "embedded...