Participants to the November 30 2011 conference on “Debating Responsible Innovation in Finance” signaled a number of hot issues in contemporary financial innovation: from the potential perils of new, complex financial products to the consequences of high-frequency trading, from the role of incentives in the financial services industry to the democratic assessment of financial problems and solutions (see a brief summary in this previous post). A group of contributors to the Observatory for Responsible Innovation (Alexandre Pointier, Stéphane Delacôte, Yamina Tadjeddine, Marc Lenglet, Fabian Muniesa and Annalivia Lacoste) share their analyses of the debates in the last issue of Debating Innovation. See “Debating responsible innovation in finance: viewpoints and commentaries” (in English) and “Débattre l’innovation responsable en finance : regards croisés” (in French).
The commentaries offer analyses and interpretations on the form and content of the discussions, on the emerging controversies, and on the meaning of “debating” on such a challenging topic. As one of the contributors put it: “The Observatory for Responsible Innovation was created because we started to realize the huge gap existing between the financial world on one side, and governments and civil society on the other side – a gap that is both an information gap and a cultural gap. This kind of debate is undoubtedly the first necessary step to reconcile these two worlds.”
