AgResearch
Browse
- No file added yet -

Disruption disrupted? Reflecting on the relationship between responsible innovation and digital agriculture research and development at multiple levels in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand

Download (3.64 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-29, 01:24 authored by Emma Jakku, Aysha Fleming, Martin Espig, Simon Fielke, Susanna Finlay-Smits, James TurnerJames Turner

Context

New forms of digital information and communication technologies have the potential to provide a “next generation” of agricultural technologies, which can drive improvements in productivity and efficiency while reducing risks and negative impacts. However, such digital transformation brings with it significant socio-ethical challenges. Responsible innovation provides insights and approaches to help guide digital transformation in socially beneficial and equitable directions.

Objective

Drawing on the authors' involvement in digital agriculture programmes in two public research organisations in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, we reflect on our collective experiences and consider who is responsible for being responsible and how public research organisations can enable more responsible digital agriculture research and innovation programmes.

Methods

This short communication is informed by a synthesis of: (i) insights from our research on socio-technical dimensions of digital agriculture programmes; (ii) critical reflections as social scientists participating in these programmes; and (iii) workshop synthesis that draws out reflections from wider programme participants about responsible innovation, developed through four collaborative workshops held virtually between May and August 2020.

Results and Conclusions

Our experiences show that responsible innovation in Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand public digital agriculture research and development so far tends to be only partially operationalised, with a mismatch between aspirations, rhetoric, and practice. Successful responsible innovation requires systemic and organisational changes to research and development practices across multiple levels to enable and enhance the ‘response-ability’ of project teams, including changes to the performance measures and reward mechanisms that encourage more responsible research and development outcomes.

Significance

Our synthesis and reflections raise broader questions about the productively disruptive potential of responsible innovation. By challenging techno-centric framings of digital agriculture and encouraging more socially responsible processes and outcomes, this ‘disruption’ by responsible innovation can ultimately add value to digital agriculture research and development programmes and innovation systems.

NZBIDA

Funding

MBIE SSIF New Zealand Bioeconomy in the Digital Age (NZBIDA)

History

Rights statement

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Publication date

2022-11-11

Project number

  • PRJ0411223

Language

  • English

Does this contain Māori information or data?

  • No

Publisher

Elsevier

Journal title

Agricultural Systems

ISSN

0308-521X

Volume/issue number

204

Page numbers

103555

Usage metrics

    Licence

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC