With the promise to improve lives, and the offer of abundant opportunities, technological innovation is regarded as a crucial enabler for the advancement of societies and economies at large.
Technologies and their applications, however, also present an array of social, economic and regulatory challenges. How to harness the benefits of technological innovation while addressing the risks associated with these developments is the subject of much discussion by governments, regulators, industry, academia and the general public.
A key aspect associated with these discussions and debates is public engagement, which is increasingly being recognised by stakeholders as a critical instrument to encourage transparency and openness, increase representativeness, and build trust in decision making and the technologies themselves. Public engagement is a broad term that is used in a variety of sectors (e.g. in research, healthcare and policymaking). In the context of technological innovation, public engagement is used to describe the involvement of a diverse group of people (the general public, but also other key groups such as lobbyists, civil society organisations and social influencers) in discussions and debates about potential applications of new and emerging technologies, their governance, regulation and the wider issues that could arise from the way that they are developed and adopted.
Better Regulation Executive (BRE), a unit from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in Uk commisioned a report to find recent evidence, in the form of a literature review and case studies, on the use of public engagement for technological innovation.
BRE Report (2021) PDF and data
The report describes the evidence including:
- Existing examples of public engagement techniques and ten case studies to illustrate how public engagement has been applied around technological innovation
- The impact of the public engagement techniques on, for example, the design of regulatory frameworks, business models, technology adoption and public trust
- Formal evaluation of the effectiveness of the public engagement techniques around technological innovation
The report offer some cross-cutting lessons:
- The use of multiple techniques over the course of the public engagement process can help to engage different ‘publics’ appropriately.
- Spreading public engagement over time allows for reflection and embedding of concepts.
- Having an impact on trust in technologies and technological innovation requires time and considered debate to increase accountability and more systematic public engagement.
- A multi-stakeholder, collaborative approach to public engagement helps to develop informed and considered judgements.
- Using online and digital-enabled public engagement techniques can potentially increase the speed, scale, inclusivity,and geographical coverage of engagement.
- Using some atypical techniques can potentially render public engagement more tangible and user-friendly and could also increase the diversity of participation.
- Having an impact on outcomes such as regulation, policy and market adoption of technological innovation typically requires buy-in and engagement with the right stakeholders.
- It is important to build evaluation into public engagement processes to track impacts and outcomes over time.
photo:NASA (Jan 29, 2021, the day after its full Moon phase. International Space Station orbited 264 miles above China near the Mongolian border.