Results from project meeting, March 30 2017, Royal HaskoningDHV office, Rotterdam

The research team, private partners, and valorisation panel members came together to discuss the progress of the research project and the way forward. The research team members Nicole Huijst and Nadja Contzen presented preliminary results of the first empirical studies and ideas for the next research phase. During discussions, the private partners gave feedback and inputs. The researchers were especially interested in suggestions for innovations that could be studied in the second project phase, namely innovations that are controversial and emotionally charged, and in fairness aspects relevant in practice.

Private partners and valorisation panel members had no difficulties to come up with ideas of controversial innovations to study; rather, they are part of their everyday working life. Especially interesting to investigate seem innovations that cause conflicts between values or even within values, such as biofuel from plastic. The technology can be seen as environmentally friendly because plastic is reused or as environmentally unfriendly because the transformation of plastic into fuels uses up a lot of energy and because combustion emits a substantial amount of CO₂. With regard to fairness aspects the practitioners emphasized the relevance of distribution conflicts of negative and positive outcomes of innovations within their projects; conflicts arise not only related to gains and losses among today’s populations but also with regard to future generations or nature. Within the research project, we will systematically study the influence of this and other fairness aspects of innovations on people’s emotions, evaluations, and acceptability ratings.