Responsible innovation: a best practices toolkit

Responsible innovation is a toolkit that helps developers become good stewards for the future of science and its effect on society. This toolkit provides a set of practices in development for anticipating and addressing the potential negative impacts of technology on people. We're sharing this as an early-stage practice for feedback and learning.

Judgment Call

Judgment Call is an award-winning responsible innovation game and team-based activity that puts Microsoft's AI principles of fairness, privacy and security, reliability and safety, transparency, inclusion, and accountability into action. The game provides an easy-to-use method for cultivating stakeholder empathy through scenario-imagining. Game participants write product reviews from the perspective of a particular stakeholder, describing what kind of impact and harm the technology could produce from their point of view.

Harms Modeling

Harms Modeling is a framework for product teams, grounded in four core pillars of responsible innovation that examines how technology can negatively impact people's lives:

• Injuries
• Denial of consequential services
• Infringement on human rights
• Erosion of democratic & societal structures

Similar to Security Threat Modeling, Harms Modeling enables product teams to anticipate potential real-world impacts of technology, which is a cornerstone of responsible development.

Community Jury

Community Jury is a technique that brings together diverse stakeholders impacted by technology. It's an adaptation of the citizen jury. The stakeholders can learn from experts about a project, deliberate together, and give feedback on use cases and product design. In addition, this responsible innovation technique allows project teams to collaborate with researchers to identify stakeholder values and understand the perceptions and concerns of impacted stakeholders.

Sustainability

The Azure Well-Architected Framework sustainability workload guidance are recommendations and principles to increase cloud efficiency across Azure workloads. This guidance is developed in partnership with the Green Software Foundation for an improved sustainability posture to help create new business value while reducing the operational footprint. This guide helps drive innovation responsibly by evaluating the impact workload design decisions have on the climate and gives concrete advice on how to build for a better tomorrow.