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RRI and Corporate Stakeholder Engagement: The Aquadvantage Salmon Case

Article  in  Sustainability · February 2021

DOI: 10.3390/su13041820

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sustainability

Article

RRI and Corporate Stakeholder Engagement: The Aquadvantage Salmon Case

Beniamino Callegari 1 and Olga Mikhailova 2,*

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Citation: Callegari, B.; Mikhailova,

O. RRI and Corporate Stakeholder

Engagement: The Aquadvantage

Salmon Case. Sustainability 2021, 13,

1820. https://doi.org/10.3390/

su13041820

Academic Editors: Marc A. Rosen,

Tatiana A. Iakovleva, Elin

Merethe Oftedal, Luciana Maines and

John Bessant

Received: 7 December 2020

Accepted: 3 February 2021

Published: 8 February 2021

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral

with regard to jurisdictional claims in

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Copyright: © 2021 by the authors.

Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

This article is an open access article

distributed under the terms and

conditions of the Creative Commons

Attribution (CC BY) license (https://

creativecommons.org/licenses/by/

4.0/).

1 School of Economics, Innovation and Technology, Kristiania University College, 0107 Oslo, Norway; [email protected].com

2 School of Economics and Business, Norwegian University of Life Sciences NMBU, 1430 Ås, Norway * Correspondence: [email protected]

Abstract: Declining public trust in science and innovation triggered the emergence and develop- ment of the responsible research and innovation (RRI) concept among policymakers and academics. Engaging stakeholders in the early phases of innovation processes has been identified as a major driver of inclusive, responsible, and sustainable development. Firms however have often adopted practices entirely opposite to those being advocated within the RRI framework, namely, reducing external interaction with stakeholders, focusing on exclusive communication with the scientific community and legal authorities while avoiding the social spotlight. We illustrate these practices, their causes and consequences using the case of the Aquadvantage salmon, the first genetically modified (GM) animal approved to petition for the United States (US) Food and Drug Adminis- tration (FDA) approval for human consumption. We find that such practices heighten the risk of social backlash, being undesirable from the perspective of both the organizations involved and society at large. Stakeholder engagement remains necessary in order to gain the minimum social acceptance required for contentious innovative products to enter the market. However, stakeholder engagement must be selective, focused on pragmatic organizations whose aims and interests are sufficiently broad to potentially align with corporate interests. Strategic stakeholder engagement offers a meeting point between the transformative aspirations of RRI framework proponents and legitimate business interests.

Keywords: RRI; stakeholder engagement; responsible innovation process; commercialization process; biotechnology; GM animal regulation

1. Introduction

Scientific progress constantly pushes onwards the boundaries of the possible, as we struggle to understand the implications and cope with the consequences. The new vistas opened by innovation, however, change according to the perspective adopted. As the world changes beyond the ability of anyone to keep up, trust in policymakers, scientists, entrepreneurs and innovators is necessary for social consensus to maintain. It is precisely this trust, however, that has been eroding at an accelerating pace in the last decades, a worrying process that does not seem to be stopping anytime soon. Responsible research and innovation (RRI) is a framework developed to support regulators, policymakers, academic entities, and corporations in constructively facing this issue and contributing to slow or even reverse the worrying trend.

While only recently introduced [1,2], the concept has proven very popular within the academic community, resulting in an explosive number of contributions in the last few years [3–6]. However, actual change in terms of practice has been more modest in scope [7]. One of the key challenges currently facing researchers active in this area is to improve our understanding of how to translate the principles into practice, and how to implement such practice in the world of policy, regulation, academia, and corporate operations. Our study focuses on a specific aspect of RRI-inspired practice, namely, the

Sustainability 2021, 13, 1820. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13041820 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability

Sustainability 2021, 13, 1820 2 of 18

constructive involvement of stakeholders within corporate innovation processes. Recent research on RRI and corporate practices has found numerous stumbling blocks prevent- ing a satisfactory implementation of stakeholder engagement practices within corporate settings [8]. Furthermore, stakeholder inclusion tends to take place at the very last phases of the innovation process, as part of the marketing process, revealing a severe misalign- ment between RRI principles and actual corporate practices [9]. While researchers have investigated how to develop effective pre-engagement tools to ensure earlier stakeholder engagement [10], stakeholder engagement in the pre-marketing phases remains relatively under-researched. This research gap has motivated our research question: which factors prevent the implementation of RRI-inspired principles of stakeholder engagement within actual corporate settings? Our study aims to contribute to the identification of the key factors responsible for the lack of stakeholder engagement, defined as corporate practices to involve stakeholders in a positive manner in organizational activities [11], in current corporate practices, distinguishing between structural features of the market economy and contingent limitation of RRI-informed guidelines. The results so obtained are used to derive practical implications aiming to improve the actual feasibility of RRI integration within the corporate world.

We investigate this problem by analyzing the case of the first GM animal commercial- ized for human consumption, the AquAdvantage salmon, and the difficult road that this controversial technology and its proponents have traveled in the last decades. We find that the decision of the company to avoid stakeholder engagement, while not unreasonable, has resulted in decades of legal strife and unprofitability, the resolution of which is still in the future, and not necessarily promising. This negative result confirms the practical relevance and potential benefit of RRI-inspired practices of stakeholder integration, but also highlights the current gap between RRI principles and their implementation. We confirm that demand for early and meaningful stakeholder integration clashes with the aim of innovation benefits appropriation, and the related need for corporate informa- tion management [8]. Furthermore, stakeholder engagement cannot solve the problem of widespread social