The responsible innovation matrix presented in the introduction contrasts ‘responsibility’ with ‘irresponsibility’, and ‘innovation’ with ‘stagnation’. While the quadrant representing RI has been much discussed, we began with the idea that the quadrant of responsible stagnation (RS) had gone largely unexplored, and we wanted to know what that might mean and what kinds of activities it might describe.

As it turned out, this Fourth Quadrant was actually full of innovation, in a broader and wider sense than might be expected by the term ‘RS’. But thinking of RI as part of a matrix, of responsibility as having impact on both innovation and stagnation, and stagnation as something that could be beneficial in certain circumstances, allowed us to decouple our thinking from growth and markets, and focus instead on what we really need innovation to do.

We take the idea of RS seriously, as a means to try to grasp the complexity of the political economy of science, technology and innovation (STI), both as policy and as process, as we take the Fourth Quadrant seriously as a space for considering innovation in business models as well as in non-market-oriented processes, goods and services which may have strong societal benefit but do not necessarily contribute to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In our concluding section, we argue that RS offers its own innovative contribution to the growing global discussion about RI, recalibrated around responsibility as its focal point, rather than getting more things to the market.

Thus, it allows us to more carefully examine the conundrum of diminishing returns and increased environmental and social hazards associated with attempts to merely increase activities that can be measured by GDP.

As there is no one-size ‘how-to’ which will fit all, our aim with this last section is not a practical set of recommendations on how to innovate for RS. Instead, we offer a compass for the expansion of RI policies and discourses, pointing towards opportunities for creative thinking about the meaning of innovation and its relationship to prosperity and progress.