Summary: Does Ethics hamper or foster innovation?

by Gil Regev ” last modified 2009-07-17 13:50

Summary: 16th Knowledge Management Round Table in Lausanne – June 23 2011

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Subject: Does Ethics hamper or foster innovation?
Presenter: Prof. Ganesh Nathan

Participants: 28

Presentation File (pdf)

Summary:

    1. Presentation – Ganesh Nathan
        1. Does ethics foster or hamper innovation?
        2. How might we resolve the dilemmas between ethics and innovation?
        3. Might responsible knowledge practices help?
    2. Discussions
        1. The roundtable discussions began by making sense of Ganesh Nathan’s shared experience. What are moral and ethical dilemmas? How do we go about deciding what is morally good or right? How do we, as individuals at these tables, perceive what is bad or good? How do we judge what is right or wrong? What are our core values? Are these shared? What are our beliefs?
        2. The topics discussed ranged from:
          1. Mass communication and education and the substance of what is right including technology possibly being used to listen to conversations
          2. The discovery of drugs through R&D spending of a lot of money for self-interest of profit maximization and whether these should be made available to lesser-developed countries for the public inzerest; how do we protect intellectual property and at the same time care about public interest?
          3. Corporations and profit maximisation with companies in countries such as Switzerland, a neutral country, building weapons or at least components to be used in weaponry. How can we define or defend our ethics, cultures and values within systems like these
          4. Internet censorship – communication has always existed; critical thinking or analysis has always been there. What about freedom of speech? What about user responsibility – should users be trained? How do we deal with companies selling data without advising clients?
        3. The flow of the discussions was varied and spilled over into various contexts. Participants shared mental models on ethical dilemmas. One recurrent theme was the influence of profit maximisation in corporations and its influence on products which translated into share price and then a lack of morals or ethical values.
    1. Thank you Ganesh and all the participants.
    1. Véronique and Gil

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