Resources for engaging citizens and stakeholders in R&I

Citizens engagement is a key dimension of Responsible Research and Innovation in Horizon 2020, a dimension which will be enhanced in Horizon Europe.

You can increase the impact of your project by involving “stakeholders” who have a stake in your project and could influence or be affected by it. You can access to local knowledge, facilitate the uptake of your project later on, find ambassadors to reach to further audience and especially access to those who have powers to change the things your project aims at changing.

Public engagement is one key of “Responsible Research and Innovation”, a cross-cutting issue in Horizon 2020 aiming at connecting sciences with society, as early as possible through public engagement, open access, gender equality, sciences education, ethics and governance.  More information on the RRI Tools website. RRI adds value in terms of increased quality of sciences, increased impact of innovation and better response to complex problems. To go deeper, check the presentation on RRI done as part of this past webinar of NCP Academy.

In particular, public engagement is more and more asked in topics but as this is a cross-cutting issue, increasing the RRI dimension of your project will pay off for all topics.

There are many possible sources of information about various methods but you can check resources developed by previous projects such as

• Toolkit developed by the SPARKS project
• Search engins among many resources by the RRI tools project
• Thinking tool of the New HORRIZON project

Other possible references are

•         Participation.at website with different methods depending on the group size
•        The art of hosting and harvesting Companion

It is sometimes delicate to implement such techniques without previous practical experience but you could also plan a training on public engagement as part of the kick off of your project if this is relevant to reach the expected impact of the topic.

Wishing you fruitful citizens engagement!

Camille Lépinay