Modes of innovation and responsibility within regional innovation systems: Reflections from the Twente region

Increasing public investments in distributed platform infrastructures have created new opportunities for economic growth and social welfare but at the same time have been associated with growing societal distrust in the power of science to solve societal problems. The concept of Responsible Research & Innovation has been advanced as providing mechanisms to recouple science and society to ensure that research and innovation continues to uphold its duties to society. In this paper, we explore the extent to which it is possible to identify repertoires of responsible innovation behaviour within extant research and innovation networks. We distinguish between two kinds of regional innovation network, those based on science and technology innovation, and those based on doing, using, inventing innovation in the eHealth sector where there are substantive societal concerns regarding responsibility and innovation. We contend that it appears that the coupling of patients to innovation networks through their prior association with innovators (e.g. as patients) affects the scope for responsibility. We therefore contend that more attention is required for understanding the dynamics of citizen-innovator coupling in regional innovation networks if responsibility is to become a more common property of these systems.