Promoting Responsible Research and Innovation in China's Hi-Tech Zones: Based on Case Studies of Zizhu Hi-Tech Zone, East Lake Hi-Tech Zone, and Guangzhou Hi-Tech Zone

Introduction

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) is a process that involves the public and all stakeholders in innovation research and takes into account social expectations and potential impacts, and can be effective in alleviating concerns about technological safety. In the 2011 European Commission report Horizon 2020, the concept of 'responsible innovation' was included for the first time as an important element of the EU's development strategy and became one of the EU's visions. In the report “Addressing ethical and regulatory challenges in research policy at the global level”, European Commission (2012) pointed out that the basic elements of responsible innovation include social interest, moral and ethical acceptability and risk management. Currently, many countries have adopted responsible research and innovation as a fundamental concept in their policy development and are actively pursuing it in the process of innovation practice to speed up technological development and promote regional economic growth (Yang and Lee, 2021). For example, workshops on responsible research and innovation were held in Brussels and London in May 2011, and practical activities such as the construction of the Rotterdam port extension in the Netherlands and SPICE project management in the UK have been implemented.

However, research on responsible innovation in China is still in its infancy, and is currently focused on reviewing and summarising the research results of foreign scholars, with the scope of research mainly covering the concept, model, indicator evaluation design and implementation of responsible innovation. The lack of holistic assessment and institutional-level research on the implementation of responsible research and innovation has left many high-tech institutions in China unaware of the importance of responsible research and innovation (Fan and Dan, 2018). Therefore, this paper will focus on the application of responsible research and innovation practices in high-tech zones (HTZs), which are industrial clusters formed by the agglomeration of high-tech enterprises. The synergistic effect of individual firms' responsible research and innovation practices on other firms in the industrial zone.

This chapter examines, from the perspective of different stakeholders:

• 1.

  Does the current system in HTZs help them practice RRI?

• 2.

  How do HTZs promote RRI?

• 3.

  Has the application of RRI produced synergy in the HTZ, or intensified the competition among enterprises in the zone?

Literature Review

With the release of China's 13th Five-Year Plan for Science and Technology Development in 2016, HTZs have become increasingly prevalent, developing into new forms of high-tech industrial cluster (Zhuang and Ye, 2020). What’s more, Sergio et al. (2020) reported that HTZs were important mediators of knowledge flows between universities and new technology-based firms. Nicoletta et al. (2019) also suggested that HTZs play a positive role in stimulating open innovation initiatives in firms. There is a great deal of research on the factors that promote the development of HTZs. For example, Wei et al. (2019) pointed out that the scope and intensity of university links were essential for the growth of HTZs (i.e. job, revenue of tenants), while Zheng and Li (2020) believed that the determining factor for its growth was the pilot policy of the central government. Moreover, Bai et al. (2015) employed the Dynamic Network Slack-based Measurement to evaluate the performance of national HTZs in China after the financial crisis and found that technical efficiency improvement impacted both production sectors and R&D sectors in HTZs. All in all, there is strong evidence that the factors above have exerted a profound influence on HTZs.