The Role of NGOs in Innovation Value Chains

The work aims to model the behavior of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) as representatives of civil society to investigate how they contribute to the development of Innovation Value Chains (IVCs) under consideration of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) keys and practices. Specifically, we examined how the presence of NGOs within a network influences the diffusion of RRI practices among ecosystem actors and whether a strong orientation of NGOs to RRI practices implies a stronger push of partners towards RRI. In addition, the impact of NGOs on the diffusion of knowledge and heterogeneity of innovative networks is analyzed. To this aim, we adopt the Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation (ABM&S) as the main methodology. ABM can model a heterogeneous population of actors who interact both with each other and the environment in a complex system with unpredictable results, without previous knowledge or assumptions about higher-level phenomena resulting from the agents' activities; moreover, it enables us to understand the dynamics of the system and not just the final state. An experimental setting is proposed, and different simulation experiments are performed. The experiments show that NGOs contribute to the diffusion of RRI practices within the ecosystem when adopting intermediate values of RRI to evaluate the possibility of joining innovative consortia. In fact, using an excessively stringent selective strategy on RRI keys results in a worse performance regarding the diffusion of RRI throughout the ecosystem. Moreover, very RRI-oriented NGOs imply a greater diffusion of knowledge and heterogeneity but subordinately to their limited involvement. The work provides useful insights to Research Funding Organizations in developing guidelines for promoting RRI practices and facilitates Research Performing Organizations in adopting RRI best practices and managing innovative dynamic networks.