A SMART Map for Synthetic BiologyExecutive Summary for the RRI Community

RoadMAPs to Societal Mobilisation for the Advancement of Responsible industrial Technologies

The SMART Map is a tool that helps businesses address issues of social and environmental responsibility they face in their innovation processes. It is based on the Responsible Research Innovation (RRI) approach promoted by the European Commission and it provides different stakeholders with practical suggestions on how to promote and put into practice these principles.

The SMART Map proposes a route that guides the RRI community from the current scenario of Synthetic Biology towards the implementation of RRI practices and their potential benefits, through a series of suggested actions and concrete examples collected during a pilot.

RRI: why you need to get thereRRI practices in the Synthetic Biology industrial context could have a number of potential benefits for the RRI community

● Helping people in developing a better and moretransparent idea of what goes on in research and innovation processes in this field

● Facilitating the next generation of scientists to be ‘RRI sensitized’

● Raising awareness of gender balance in the lab,especially related to structural and unconsciousbiases at senior positions

● Enabling greater transparency of research resultsand assisting researchers at all stages

Current scenario of Synthetic Biology

Implementation of RRI practices BenefitsSuggested

actions

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RRI: how you get thereA list of suggested actions the RRI community could implement to help moving Synthetic Biology towards RRI

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3.Helping to acknowledge and identify the diversity of roles and functions present in the RRI-sensitised innovation ecosystem

Diffusing knowledge and awareness of RRI and building collective interest in the concepts and their reputational benefit to companies

Encouraging open and transparent ways of engaging a range of publics including civil society and end-users

● ‘Genies’ and ‘Bottles’: building-in self-destructionproperties to synthetically produced organism;researching how organisms react in and impact uponnatural environments

● Combinatorial Knowledge: incorporating and inter-facing different disciplines (systems and molecularbiology, bio-chemistry, chemistry, computationalsciences and bio-informatics) at all levels

● Culture and Gender influences in Upstream Science Production: incorporating anticipatory and reflexive/participative methods into the training of scientists

● Industrial (Re)structuring: facing new regulatory andresponsibility challenges, including increased risks ofthe production of new unregulated bio-entities andbio-hacking

● Global-shifts and implications for geo-political economy: anticipating significant geo-economic shifts,raising questions of who will take responsibility to alertand support producers to diversify their productionand/or change their business models

Needs, challenges and opportunities for RRIKey highlights in the current scenario of Synthetic Biology

RoadMAPs to Societal Mobilisation for the Advancement of Responsible industrial Technologies www.projectsmartmap.eu

● The need to approach RRI as an ecosystem: it isessential to build and maintain interactions amongdifferent players at all levels of the innovation process.

● The need to establish framework conditions: it ispivotal to implement standards and certificationprocesses as well as incentives and rewards that couldpromote RRI practices.

● The need to invest in communities: there is a clear need for virtual and physical meeting places, to foster cross-stakeholder collaboration and build communities who practice RRI.

● The need to learn from and not replicate successful existing initiatives governing the emergence of new technologies in general and synthetic biology in particular.

Societal Mobilisation GoalsWhere the multi-stakeholder activities believe the sector should go

tools pilot2 industrial dialogues

toolselection

stakeholder selection SMART Map

The pilot phase: testing one of the RRI toolboxes in the Synthetic Biology industrial context

The selected tool was a Repository of Learning Cases, a collection of case studies showing different experiences for different purposes/audiences. Personnel from the three organisations acted as case study authors, following a common case study ‘Template’. This template acted both as an RRI guidance document and as a common template of questions. The pilot generated three comparative cases as a small start point towards the larger long-term objective of establishing a Repository of Learning Cases.

“That the SMART-map community creates a repository of cases that demonstrates how other organisations have been achieving RRI; a shared understanding derived from individual cases that can be placed in the Repository of Cases as a start point will help us learn and develop shared standards that can then be codified into some kind of Accreditation or RRI Standard.”

Kevin Bown – Defence Science and Technology Laboratory

How the SMART Map has been drafted

The SMART Map is the outcome of a process that began with two workshops, the Industrial Dialogues, that took place in Manchester (UK) and Budapest (Hungary). A broad range of stakeholders participated in the workshops and produced a number of proposals of RRI Synthetic Biology toolboxes.

The selected tool was tested through the participation of three diverse organisations: Dstl, a governmental science and technology development and commissioning organisation, Cambridge Consultants, a knowledge consultancy, and Innovation and Sparkling Science Ltd, a synthetic biology micro-business.

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participants

actors from the Industry sector

Civil Society Organisations

research institutions

complex toolboxes co-designed by participants

The tool: Repository of Learning CasesPilot organizations: Dstl; Cambridge Consultants; Innovation and Sparkling Science Ltd

The Manchester and Budapest Industrial Dialogues