While innovation should be about socioeconomic transformation of society, concerns have been raised about its negative externalities including growing disparities within and between regions. Arguably, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) offers a potential solution to address these concerns. However, in theory, its conceptualization and operationalization remain ambiguous. Further, in practice, this makes its application to regional development difficult. Accordingly, this study first conducts a systematic literature review of conceptual papers on RRI. It identifies themes and categorizes them into four domains: drivers, tools, outcomes and barriers. Second, these domains are applied to regional innovation studies. The paper contributes to an increased understanding of RRI and its applications to sustainable regional development as well as how RRI and regional innovation studies can benefit from each other.

The increasing adaptation of digitalisation has engendered numerous venture ideas and entrepreneurial opportunities. Many of these ideas bear the potential to address grand societal challenges. However, perceived opportunities can be elusive, especially in the context of complex problems. Opportunity confidence (OC) can be essential to venture creation and firm development. OC depends on evaluating socioeconomic, socio-ethical, and socioecological factors, which are not straightforward. Responsible innovation (RI) can be a viable approach to building OC. However, whether or how firms and entrepreneurs pursue RI to build OC needs to be clarified. Accordingly, we explore these issues through a case study of nine for-profit firms in digital healthcare and welfare services. The findings reveal that although the firms do not integrate RI principles in innovation and entrepreneurial activities per se, they practice them to varying degrees. This helps them to build OC. The study contributes to theory, practice, and policy.

Digital innovations integrated with Responsible innovation (RI) offer great potential to address complex societal challenges in the healthcare and welfare sector but depend on how well firms can manage the innovation process to ensure socially desirable solutions. However, there is a lack of empirical studies examining whether RI principles can be integrated into a firm’s innovation development process. This paper aims to fill this gap through longitudinal case studies of six digital start-ups in the healthcare and welfare sector from 2016 to 2019. We followed innovation development in these firms, observing the stakeholder inclusion, pivotal moments and the emergence of new solutions based on the need-solution interactions. We found that stakeholder inclusion is critical. Therefore, we suggest that managers and entrepreneurs consider including a diversity of stakeholders and users from the design phase throughout the innovation process.