Creating Impactful Standards:

Abstract

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has seen a recent surge in policy uptake, but currently lacks guidance on clear institutionalisation in practice (Burget et al., 2017; Owen et al., 2021). Formal standards have tremendous potential as a possible instrument in order to meet societal challenges due to the anticipatory and inclusive nature of standardisation processes. Yet standardisation present an under researched field of study in relation to RRI. The goal of this study is to test the relative importance of typical RRI dimensions and their criteria in formal standard development processes, since it is not clear if the concepts of RRI are important to organisations (Stahl et al., 2017). In order to test the relative importance of RRI dimensions, core concepts and their applicability were explored in the context of standardisation through a series of semi-structured interview with NEN professionals. Subsequently, a questionnaire was administered among standardisation professionals at NEN. Respondents were asked to rank the relevant RRI criteria. A BWM analysis was performed to make pairwise comparisons between RRI criteria to calculate their overall weights. Results indicate that the diversity of participation, consensus and the role of information are considered most important, followed by the identification of standards’ impact. This suggests that adoption of standards requires a wide variety of participants relevant to the standards context to enable broad support. This is further supported by the need for consensus and openness to protect participants’ interests and increase trust in the process. Lastly, the study suggests the need for standards to be impactful for them to be used and useful.