Ethics, Innovation, and the Corporation

If you are a student with a technical background, you will often contribute to innovation as a manager, engineer, or researcher in established companies.

Innovation drives economic and social progress. But we also know that innovation can have downsides. Though particular innovation may benefit the company, they may have tremendous social and environmental costs for others.

This course will teach you about the ethics of innovation in established companies. We aim to enable you to understand innovation as a deeply ethical progress with significance far beyond the individual company. And we will look at concrete innovation projects to understand how different criteria for innovation, e.g. from finance, marketing, or strategy, are related and sometimes in tensions and how you can analyse and evaluate them from an ethical perspective.

We will start with a broad question about the social role and responsibility of corporations in society. Some have argued that the only legitimate aim of corporate innovation must be to benefit the shareholders of a corporation. This view is in stark tension with the fact that corporations and their innovations have tremendous and often negative effects on the environment and people outside the circle of shareholders. We will discuss different concepts and ethical theories to analyse and evaluate the responsibility of companies. The ambition of the course is to confront ideal theory with the particularities of practice. Therefore, we will devote some time to think about how the prescriptions of normative theory can be implemented in the real world. This will lead us to discuss the Design for Values approach, an influential approach to implementing responsible innovation that features prominently in the work of TU Delft researchers. In addressing a corporation's role in society, the course will challenge you to think about the fundamental aim of innovation in corporations and introduce them to some fundamental theories from moral philosophy, business ethics, and political economy.

We will then turn to questions about concrete innovation projects. As a future engineer, technology manager, consultant, or researcher who faces concrete innovation projects, you will need to know how companies can live up to their responsibility in practice. It is one thing to know about the responsibilities of corporations in theory, and quite another to translate them to concrete criteria for an innovation in practice. In innovation processes, values often conflict. For example, it may be cost effective to use cheaper materials for a product, which creates a tension from a safety and risk perspective. We will see that tensions between different requirements in an innovation process will often occur. We will discuss how to identify, analyse, and evaluate tensions using concepts and theories from philosophy and you will apply your knowledge to concrete cases, in individual assignments and in groups. Though we will not present an algorithm or ultimate answer for resolving conflicts, we aim to equip you you with the tools and the required critical understanding to innovate responsibly.

As part of the minor Companies and Value Sensitive Innovation, this course will equip you with a more nuanced understanding of the ethical aspects of innovation in general, and with the tools and concepts to better understand how we can innovate in a way that is economically successful while being ethically sensible.