The Research-Technology Management journal has posted a call for manuscripts (max 5000 words) for a special issue on Responsible Innovation for Emerging Technology: Navigating Ethics, Society, Diplomacy, and Sustainability, edited by Nuran Acur, Dr Jarryd Daymond, Dr Carlos Carbajal, and Prof. Minu Kumar. The deadline for manuscript submission is 01 October 2025.

The editors are seeking submissions on how emerging technologies are responsibly developed, executed, and implemented to drive meaningful change and address grand challenges.

The special issue seeks to examine practical opportunities and challenges for deploying emerging technologies responsibly across business, societal, and political domains, and to bridge the gap between potential and practice by exploring case studies, action research, and best practices to demonstrate how emerging technologies are responsibly developed, executed, and implemented to drive meaningful change and address grand challenges.

Drawing on theoretical insights and lessons from practice, a further aim is to explore how responsible innovation frameworks can be adapted to anticipate, assess, and address the complex risks and opportunities associated with emerging technologies. Analyzing “lessons learned” from successes and failures will illuminate ethical, socially responsible, and economically feasible strategies, contributing to future policies and standards for sustainable technological development.

The editors are actively seeking papers in the following topics:

• Firms’ governance and strategies for responsible innovation: Firms’ development of regulatory strategies and governance models that facilitate responsible innovation.
• Anticipatory governance and foresight: Use of foresight tools to anticipate and mitigate potential adverse impacts of innovations.
• Stakeholder engagement and public participation: Methods for effectively involving stakeholders and the public in the innovation process to better anticipate technological harms.
• Cultural and contextual influences on responsible innovation: Studies on how cultural and regional contexts affect responsible innovation’s adoption (or lack thereof) and practice.
• Ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies: Exploration of ethical considerations in fields like AI, biotechnology, quantum technology, and data privacy.
• Integrating responsible innovation into organizational practices: Strategies for embedding responsible practices within corporate culture and operations.
• Measurement and assessment of responsible initiatives: Development of metrics and indicators to evaluate the effectiveness of responsible innovation efforts.
• Sustainability and environmental responsibility: Aligning innovation with environmental sustainability goals and practices.
• Case studies and sector-specific applications of responsible innovation: Analysis of responsible innovation implementation in specific industries such as healthcare, energy, or urban development.

The editors stress that they welcome empirical studies that follow different methodological approaches and encourage innovative, thoughtful, provocative, and critical submissions ranging from case study research to experimental research, and both qualitative and quantitative contributions.

Further details are available here.