Responsible Innovations: Exploratory study Americas Conference on Information Systems 1 Exploratory Study of Responsible Innovation: Toward a Holistic Approach to Sustainability Completed Research Sarah Cherki El Idrissi Université Laval Sarah.cherki-el-idrissi.1@ulaval.ca Jacqueline Corbett Université Laval Jacqueline.corbett@fsa.ulaval.ca Sehl Mellouli Université Laval Sehl.Mellouli@fsa.ulaval.ca Abstract The Information Systems (IS) community has been called to address the important challenge of sustainable development, but progress continues to be slow. Elsewhere, responsible innovation (RI) has emerged as a framework to support the integration of sustainability considerations into the innovation process. The aim of this paper is to explore how organizations operationalize the main RI principles – anticipation, inclusion, responsiveness, and reflexivity. Based on a qualitative exploratory study, this paper develops insights into practices taken by organizations to address sustainability issues through their IS innovation processes. Our findings suggest that organizations operationalize RI principles highly or partially under the influence of five factors. A new understanding of the RI principles operationalization and its applicability to IS innovations is developed, which can serve to direct further research and guide organizations aiming to enhance their sustainability performance. Keywords Responsible innovation, IS innovation, sustainability, green IS. Introduction Information Systems (IS) innovations can contribute to addressing different social and environmental issues in addition to being a source of economic prosperity for present and future generations. IS scholars have engaged in many areas that contribute to sustainability (Cherki El Idrissi 2017; Lee et al. 2018). For example, IS research has investigated the use of IS platforms to address the energy challenge (Ketter et al. 2016), explored the social complexity of green IS projects (Trid et al. 2019) and studied the potential of IS in sustainability reporting and performance (Seethamraju and Frost 2019). Still, the community lacks a holistic approach to achieving the triple bottom line (TBL) of sustainability. Responsible innovation (RI) is a framework that could help to integrate sustainability considerations into the IS innovation process. The RI framework is based on four principles: anticipation, inclusion, responsiveness, and reflexivity. The suitability of the RI framework for IS research has been established (Stahl et al. 2013); however, studies focusing on this concept and its applicability to IS innovations are scarce. The literature suggests integrating RI within the IS field is a challenge for many reasons. First, integrating RI within IS innovation processes requires effort to tailor RI goals and definitions according to the objectives and values of the specific contexts where the organizations operate (Macnaghten et al. 2014). Second, organizations across many sectors are not yet familiar with RI concept and do not know how to apply it to their innovation processes (Gurzawska et al. 2017). Third, the IS literature concentrates mostly on the role of IS for environmental sustainability (Pernici et al. 2012). Thus, integrating RI in IS brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)