The mission of the Giannino Bassetti Foundation is to promote responsibility in innovation and specifically to foster responsibly innovative processes.

Today, the growing role of techno-science in society calls for responsibly innovative ways of governing it: there is a need to operate a convergence between the notions of citizens’ rights, new ways of governing science and a new idea of democracy.

Science and Technology Studies contest the received view of a politically neutral “citadel of scientists” in which moral integrity and the pursuit of “factual truth” support each other. It is actually this “intrinsic ethic” of the scientific community that denies the need for specific guarantees in the relationship between science and society, analogous to the one regulating the relationship between state and citizens.

As a response to this problem, the Italian edition of the report “Taking European Knowledge Society Seriously” authoritatively introduces the STS debate also in Italy at a time where political and collective experimentations with new forms of participatory democracy begin to be discussed.

“Scienza e Governance. La società europea della conoscenza presa sul serio”, is published by Rubbettino, 2008 under the auspices of the Bassetti Foundation.