"Daddy, Can I Have a Puddle Gator?": Creativity, Anticipation, and Responsible Innovation

This chapter explores what beyond curiosity helps constitute responsible innovation. It focuses on anticipation, not only because it is a signature concept that the research center the author has tried to develop through its vision of "anticipatory governance", but more importantly because it is perhaps the most crucial and problematic dimension to deal with. But, whereas there are relatively clear intuitions and broad literatures around reflection, deliberation, and responsiveness; there is less conceptual development around anticipation, and even poorer intuitions. Beyond a general exploration and definition of anticipation in the context of responsible innovation, the chapter also addresses two specific issues within anticipation: the politics of novelty, which helps center questions of responsible innovation not on the issue of the newness of innovation, but rather on its purpose; and the challenge of speculative ethics, which confronts the nature of our dispositions toward the future.