The Responsible Innovator: Reckoning the Legitimacy of Competing Worldviews through a Role-Playing Game

This chapter has two objectives. First, it exposes a critical but underexplored dimension of responsible innovation (RI): innovators’ moral and cognitive capacities. While RI frameworks often emphasize procedural principles and desirable outcomes, less attention has been paid to the practical judgement and moral reflexivity required of innovators operating in complex, value-laden environments. Drawing on the pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot—particularly their Economies of Worth model—we argue that cultivating the virtues necessary for RI requires a process of moral decentring, wherein innovators are encouraged to step outside their own evaluative frameworks and consider alternative conceptualization of the common good. Then we move on to present a framework devised to prompt decentring, thus explaining what is at stake in the education of responsible innovators. The framework takes the shape of a role-playing game designed to foster practical judgement by engaging participants in projective prototyping and structured reflection through diverse moral lenses. The game, called Moral Prism, operationalizes Boltanski and Thévenot’s typology of moral worlds, prompting innovators to inhabit competing logics—market, civic, domestic, fame, inspiration, and industrial—and reflect on how these shape notions of value, legitimacy, and appropriate action. We situate the game’s development within ongoing debates about the subjective foundations of innovation, the ideological nature of problem framing, and the risks of uncritical innovation. In doing so, we argue that such immersive, reflective tools are crucial to preparing innovators for the ethical complexity and pluralism inherent in RI practices.