The Journal of Responsible Innovation (JRI) provides a forum for discussions of the normative assessment and governance of knowledge-based innovation. JRI offers humanists, social scientists, policy analysts and legal scholars, and natural scientists and engineers an opportunity to articulate, strengthen, and critique the relations among approaches to responsible innovation, thus giving further shape to a newly emerging community of research and practice. These approaches include ethics, technology assessment, governance, sustainability, socio-technical integration, and others.

JRI intends responsible innovation to be inclusive of such terms as responsible development and sustainable development, and the journal invites comparisons and contrasts among such concepts. While issues of risk and environmental health and safety are relevant, JRI especially encourages attention to the assessment of the broader and more subtle human and social dimensions of innovation—including moral, cultural, political, and religious dimensions, social risk, and sustainability addressed in a systemic fashion.