REALIGN Toolkit: Reflexivity, Adaptability, Leadership, and Inclusion as Pillars of Responsible Research and Innovation

While public engagement and interdisciplinary collaborations are now requirements within Responsible Research and Innovation frameworks, a growing body of Science and Technology Studies literature has critiqued how these processes are insufficient on their own and how they often reduce social scientists and humanities scholars’ engagement to tokenistic exercises aimed at legitimising and accelerating technological adoption. With this Open Letter, we address these limitations. Drawing on our collective experience and expertise as social scientists, humanities scholars, and technology developers, we propose a toolkit to reframe responsibility in research and innovation as a collective and sustained effort.

We argue that it is necessary to move beyond existing RRI approaches and to actively engage with critical, culturally informed, and interdisciplinary practices that acknowledge the layered complexities of innovation ecosystems, the social construction of technology, and the power asymmetries embedded in participatory processes. To achieve this, we offer a conceptual and reflexive toolkit with recommendations for fostering meaningful, continuous, and early-stage engagement with stakeholders that can advance ethically grounded, socially responsive, and culturally situated research and innovation systems. We call this toolkit REALIGN, as it is centred on four pillars: Reflexivity, Adaptability, Leadership, and Inclusion.

We offer case studies from our projects, situated in East Asia and Western Europe, the regions with the most rapidly ageing populations. There, assistive robotics has emerged as a promising field for addressing socioeconomic challenges generated by this unprecedented demographic shift. Our critical analysis highlights persistent issues such as late-stage and selective public involvement and the marginalisation of vulnerable user groups. We also include examples of participatory design practices aimed at keeping innovation processes context-sensitive and responsive to real-world needs. We conclude that achieving responsible research and innovation approaches requires robust governance structures, interdisciplinary collaborations, and sustained dialogue among funders, scientists, policymakers, and diverse publics.