The governance of science and innovation is a growing concern for our democracies. One of the key questions is who should be the legitimate actor making decisions around which innovation should be developed and rolled out. And as a response, two major policy-making trends are emerging. The first is the growing influence of RRI, which puts emphasis on broad public engagement in policymaking, moving from “traditional” forms of consultation towards co-creation as a way of more deeply involving society in contributing and directing policies. The second one concerns the attempts to include design knowledge in policy formation and implementation, which has a view in creating policies more open to participation, experimentation, as well as being more responsive to the local contexts.

Our research teams have produced an important piece of research around these topics. They have divided it into 5 different areas: 1) ideal versus real policymaking, 2) the concept of co-creation applied to policy-making 3) specificities of co-creation in STI policy-making, 4) introduction of design approaches, and 5) an analysis of the notion of co-creation within RRI.

The research has yielded a number of results that cannot be summarised in a single news piece, but to give you a taste of the results here are the main findings:

• Bridging the gap between policy ideation and implementation calls for a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches.
• Policy cycles are ideal models of the policy process meant to achieve efficiency and effectiveness but are far from reality.
• Context matters! Policies, programmes and measures cannot be moved from one domain or place freely.
• Co-creation requires cultural and organisational transformation.
• Citizens and stakeholders may assume different roles in the co-creation process.
• We need to establish the credibility and value of public perspectives.
• The outputs of co-creation need to fit the machinery of policy-making.
• Policies may be seen as objects of design: design approaches seem to be particularly apt at handling complex and undefined problems.
• Effective processes and tools must fit their context.
• No need to reinvent the wheel: the tool you are looking for is probably out there.

The full research can be found here.