The Brazil team conducted the Brazilian Workshop on Responsible Research and Innovation under the title “How to imagine/implement responsibility in research and innovation?” on February 16, at FUNCAMP’s Casa do Professor Visitante. The event was attended by representatives from some of Brazil’s major players in science, technology and innovation. The discussed topics included what the term means in Brazil, the challenges and opportunities for implementation of RRI in the country, and the existing initiatives in each institution.
The participants actively discussed the workshop topics and seemed very open to the concept of RRI. Most of them identified many RRI-related values in their institution’s missions: serving the community, providing research and development to ensure societal betterment, commitment to open access, and willingness to engage with society. The workshop showed that there is an overall openness to ideas stemming from the RRI framework, which could readily engage with Brazilian institutional practice. Challenges to RRI implementation were also discussed (the lack of infrastructure to implement some of the actions needed to make RRI concrete, the costs of engaging with society or making data open, institutional values such as autonomy).
You can read a more detail report about the event here, and see numerous photographs from the workshop on this link.