Project meeting, January 23 2020, Royal HaskoningDHV office, Amersfoort

This workshop brought together members of the project team, private partners and valorization panel to brainstorm ideas for creating a user-friendly toolkit. The aim of the toolkit is to translate our research findings into simple guidelines for developing socially responsible innovations.

The project team began the workshop with a brief recap of the research, with Maddie Judge providing an overview of the theoretical framework linking values, emotions and responses to sustainable innovations, and Steffen Steinert discussing the role of art in technology acceptance and the blind spots in research on emotions. Some questions raised during this session included: How do we find out what values the public holds? Are there any examples of successful attempts to tailor messages to multiple values? How do we encourage people to open up about their emotions and values in business environments?

In the next session, participants were invited to discuss the practical implications of the project from their perspectives. Some of the feedback included that emotions should be considered from the beginning of a project, in addition to technological and financial feasibility; however, in the past there has sometimes been resistance to bringing in the public. Additionally, practitioners often assume what the client wants, without necessarily asking them, so companies could be better profiling their values and the values of their clients. It was also reported that the framework had already been useful for helping understand the source of emotional responses in discussions about Carbon Capture Systems.

After a short coffee break, we broke into smaller groups to brainstorm ideas for the toolkit. We discussed how different tools may be useful at different stages of the development process. For example, an interactive boardgame to educate people about the basic framework could be helpful at the idea-generation stage, whereas an app to help practitioners systematically think through potential responses to their innovation could help with fine-tuning at the financing stage. We will also need to consider a communication strategy for the toolkit, including how it could be integrated into existing company practices, and how its effectiveness can be evaluated. Finally, we concluded the workshop by discussing the plan of action for the coming year.

Thank you again to all the workshop participants for their productive and engaging discussions and examples of other helpful tools, and an extra big thanks to Carl and the Royal HaskoningDHV for generously hosting the workshop.