At face value, responsible innovation (RI) and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) address several aspects which were neglected in previous innovation concepts. With a more holistic framework, they suggest a great potential for global adaptability. However, a purely optimistic view risks ignoring the role that technological innovation has had in the so-called developing world and perpetuating patterns that conflict with the ‘ethics matters’ and ‘living gently’ aspects of responsible stagnation (RS). As mentioned in Chapter 5, the Global South represents a great reservoir of alternative ways of framing innovation. While these do not consciously conceptualize themselves as RS, they do open up new ways of thinking about technical change beyond the fetishism of endless growth – ideas which form an essential part of the Fourth Quadrant of the innovation matrix. This chapter highlights the complexity and challenges of innovation in the Global South, drawing on the reflections of anthropologists and post-colonial scholars to consider how responsibility (beyond growth) and RI might be approached to make these concepts relevant to countries in the Global South, without repeating the patterns of colonization which are contrary to RS's underlying ethos of care.

In The World and the West, the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee reflects on the role of technology as a transformative social agent within foreign societies. He anticipated what the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) would eventually come to claim – that technology (and therefore innovation) is culturally, socially and politically constructed, whether unconsciously or by design: