A Responsible Research & Innovation Model for Impact investment & Responsible Startups (RRIstart)
Project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme
Grant Agreement: 101005937
Duration: 36 months
Starting date: 1/03/2021
The project official website
RRIstart will be carried out by a consortium of 6 organisations from 4 European countries, coordinated by the University of Rome “La Sapienza”.
RRIstart intends to promote RRI among STEM start-ups, in the framework of the EU support of “impact investment” (i.e., investments that produce fair results from an environmental, social and economic point of view). Based on this, the project has the specific objectives of developing an innovative RRI-based model for start-ups, complemented by an RRI-based impact investment indicator list in a multi-stakeholder (beyond the quadruple helix, represented by research, industry, policy and civil society sectors) context. RRIstart will also identify new constellations of actors to enable RRI-based start-ups and impact investment and will pilot the contextualized RRI model for start-ups and the adapted RRI-based impact investment indicators through them.
The research activities of RRIstart will be carried out using mainly qualitative methodologies, including literature review, stakeholder consultation and implementation of pilot projects with start-ups, which will be accompanied whit a systematic observation process. These pilot activities will involve STEM start-ups in the fields of environment, advanced materials and biotechnology (agrifood). The research, networking and scientific communication activities will include exchanges and relations also outside the countries of the Consortium members.
RRIstart comprises 6 Work Packages. K&I will be involved in the main activities and deliverables of the project and will be responsible for the WP3 entitled “Policy, Governance & Exploitation”, in which it will follow, in particular, the definition of the “Guidelines for governance settings for exploiting RRI in start-ups”.