Best Practices for a Responsible Innovation Process

Abstract

Responsible Innovation seems to undoubtedly becoming an inexorable and necessary trend. That is, society calls for a higher embedding of values and ethics within the innovation process, especially with regards to sustainability. However, so far practical application of Responsible Innovation frameworks remains mostly at policy or academic level, while it is still scarce at firm level. Furthermore, innovation process' enhancement in the highly-competitive automotive industry has become a hot topic in the last decade, especially given the increasing pressures from consumers and governments, towards more sustainable vehicles while still maintaining competitive pricing. However, not all car manufacturers can be considered as highly-innovative as it may appear from an industry with such a tough and complex environment and technical development pace. This thesis carries out a case study of one of those firms (SEAT), and through a benchmarking framework, it intends to point out the most significant performance improvement areas when compared to the best-in-class firms from a cross-industry range, regarding the innovation processes of new product development. The emphasis is placed on Responsible Innovation, supported by other emerging approaches such as Open Innovation and Co-creation. This benchmarking process lead to an elaboration of a best-practices code for 'product innovation' processes’ management, which can be extrapolated to other firms of the automotive industry, as well as the future development of innovation culture change strategies to be carried out within this firm. Coevally, lessons are intended to be applicable to other firms, for allowing cross-industry learning. These lessons, in the form of best-practices, entitled measures for: increasing participation of all relevant internal and external stakeholders, improving the anticipation for the bi-directional interaction of innovation and the socio-technical context, enriching and deepening the deliberation process, and increasing the capability for responsiveness and reflexivity. These are extensively enlisted as recommendations both for academic and company purposes.