Specific Challenge:

Understanding the evolution of science and society will help proactive and anticipatory policy making. This includes examining how societal actors, including young people, behave, understand, react to and interact with science and scientific developments, and their motives for engaging in science-related activities. It encompasses investigating science communication and science advocacy in the digital world, and how science and technology studies and different disciplines (e.g. behavioural sciences, communication studies, gender studies, linguistics, and social anthropology) – and multi/transdisciplinary approaches – can help explain interactions between science and society. This includes a focus on blind spots of research and innovation in relation to people's needs and concerns and in any of the areas or dimensions covered by RRI. Moreover, consideration could be given to rewarding achievement in RRI in its various dimensions to signal the organisations that are more RRI aware (answering questions such as how such a reward could work and based on which criteria). Another area is implications of deep changes in science and innovation and their interactions with society and the economy, such as the transition to open science and open innovation, and resultant changes in the relationships between science and society.