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Against
Excellence
Jack Stilgoe
j.stilgoe@ucl.ac.uk
@jackstilgoe

“Doing high quality research is hard and
there needs to be a clear focus on
excellence, generally best assessed by
highly accomplished researchers in the
relevant field.”

“A clearly thought through and acceptable
pathways to impact is an essential component
of a research proposal and a condition of
funding. Applicants are required to use this
section of the proposal to identify the potential
impact of their work and to outline the steps
they can sensibly make now to facilitate the
realisation of those impacts… If a proposal is
ranked high enough to be funded but does not
have an acceptable Pathways to Impact it will
be returned.”

Excellence and relevance are
drifting further apart

Responsible
research and
innovation

Responsible research and
innovation
in Horizon 2020

Why responsible research and
innovation?
1. Grand challenges
2. The uncertainties of emerging
technologies

“I am optimistic enough about this that I am
willing to make a prediction. By 2035, there
will be almost no poor countries left in the
world.”
Bill Gates, 2014

“This disparity between rich and poor has
been noticed… Whatever else survives to
the year 2000, that won’t.”
CP Snow, The Two Cultures, 1959

“In the future, people will spend less time
trying to get technology to work ... If we get
this right, I believe we can fix all the world’s
problems.”
Eric Schmidt, Google
“There are a lot of really big issues for the
world that need to be solved and, as a
company, what we are trying to do is to build
an infrastructure on top of which to solve
some of these problems.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

Pope Francis, World Economic
Forum, Davos, 2014
“Those who have
demonstrated their
aptitude for being
innovative and for
improving the lives of
many people by their
ingenuity and
professional expertise
can further contribute by
putting their skills at the
service of those who are
still living in dire poverty.”

Neglected tropical diseases
Source: Thomson Reuters
http://sciencewatch.com/tags/tags/neglected-tropical-diseases

Energy: An innovation deficit
Source: Richard Jones, University of Sheffield

1. What is the purpose?
2. Why do you want to do it?
3. What are you going to gain
from it?
4. What else is it going to
do?
5. How do you know you are
right?

Pathologies of innovation
– Late lessons from early warnings (EEA)
– The dilemma of control (David Collingridge)
– Systemic risk and normal accidents (Charles
Perrow)
– Technological lock-in (Paul David)
– Myths of technological fixes (Dan Sarewitz)
– Altered nature of human action (Hans Jonas)
– Organised irresponsibility (Ulrich Beck)
– Hype and Expectations (Brown, Hedgecoe et al.)
– Deficit models of publics (Brian Wynne)
– Technologies as experiments; Society as a
laboratory (Krohn and Weyer)

Responsibility
• From retrospective… (accountability and
liability)
• … to prospective (care and
responsiveness)
• … and collective
• Role responsibilities normally trump
general responsibilities
• Second-order (or meta-)responsibilities

Responsible innovation is ‘collective care for
the future through the stewardship of
innovation in the present’
(Stilgoe, Owen and Macnaghten 2013)

Anticipation
•From predictive to participatory
•Expectations and Imaginaries
•Tools
•Anticipatory Governance
•Vision assessment
•Scenarios
•Barriers to anticipation
•Guston, 2012; van Lente, 1993;
•Fortun, 2005; Barben et al, 2008
Inclusion
•The ‘new’ scientific governance
•Dialogue and ‘mini-publics’
•The challenge of legitimacy
•Input and outputs
•Wilsdon and Willis, 2004; Grove-White et al, 1997;
•Goodin and Dryzek, 2006; Irwin et al, 2013;
• Lovbrand et al 2011
Reflexivity
•From 1st to 2nd order
•Tools
•Codes of conduct
•Midstream Modulation
•Wynne, 1993; Schuurbiers, 2011;
•Swiestra, 2009; Fisher et al, 2006
Responsiveness
•Answering and reacting
•Diversity and resilience
•Value-sensitive design
•De facto governance
•Political economy of innovation
•Responsibility as metagovernance
•Pellizoni, 2004; Collingridge, 1980; Friedman,
•1996; Stirling, 2007; Kearnes and Rip, 2009
Responsible
innovation

“Excellence itself is multidimensional”
Helga Nowotny, 2012
(but it tends to concentrate research
funding)

A need for… “a redefinition of
excellence among academics, of
their career aspirations, of their
disciplinary contributions, and
their institutional loyalties.”
“Success in Mode 1 might
perhaps be summarily described
as excellence defined by
disciplinary peers. In Mode 2
success would have to include
the additional criteria such as
efficiency or usefulness, defined
in terms of the contribution the
work has made to the overall
solution of transdisciplinary
problems.”

‘Excellence is the way forward.’
Morten Østergaard, 17 April 2012

‘We need to shift the focus from
aspiring to creating the best science
in the world to aspiring to creating
the best science for the world.’
Morten Østergaard, 23 April 2012

Women Fellows of the Royal
Society
Georgina Ferry, The exception and the rule: women and the Royal Society,1945-2010
Women fellows by date

Peer Review and
Gender
Wenneras and Wold (1997)

“Assessment of scientific excellence, far
from being an exercise in disinvested and
disinterested judgments, is one of situated
knowledge-making, reproducing the cultures
from which it emanates.”
Gabriele Griffin

Knowledge vs. Wisdom
“Knowledge exists in two forms - lifeless,
stored in books, and alive, in the
consciousness of men. The second form of
existence is after all the essential one; the
first, indispensable as it may be, occupies
only an inferior position.”
Albert Einstein

Democratising quality control in
science

Slow science is…
‘…the art of dealing with, and learning from
what scientists too often consider messy,
that is, what escapes general, so-called
objective categories’
Stengers, 2011

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Against excellence

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