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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how the EU’s SRIA shapes nanomedicine innovation and how open participatory co-production processes may problematize and generate alternative socio-technical imaginaries, expanding innovation trajectories beyond its competitiveness-driven, industry-oriented agenda.

Paper long abstract

The last decades have seen the consolidation of nanomedicine as a global R&D&I sector within an organized and growing community. European policies fund research and translation, help structure value chains, and foster the emergence of an industrial and economic sector. In this context, the European Technology Platform for Nanomedicine (ETPN), through its Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA), defines the scope of nanomedicine in Europe until 2030 and sets research and innovation priorities. Its main objectives are to address unmet medical needs, combine nanotechnology with other key enabling technologies, integrate medical innovations into healthcare systems, and strengthen the global competitiveness of the European healthcare sector.

This paper analyzes the directionalities of innovation that both constrain and are constrained by the SRIA objectives for nanomedicine. The analysis draws on a two-year open participatory process for the co-production of nanoparticles for health applications. This participatory setting enables an examination of how strategic frameworks such as the SRIA may privilege particular socio-epistemic directions of scientific innovation over alternative ones. In this sense, the two-year co-production process was deliberately not oriented by predefined innovation objectives. Instead, it provided an open setting in which diverse publics could critically reflect on the ‘nano futures’ projected by dominant frameworks such as the SRIA and, more importantly, articulate alternative socio-technical imaginaries of their own through anticipatory co-creation practices. These imaginaries included prioritizing exploratory research on high-uncertainty diseases, patient epistemic agency, and open, accessible nanotechnology infrastructures, thereby expanding the range of innovation trajectories of SRIA’s competitiveness-driven, industry-oriented agenda.