Playbook

Responsible Innovation Checklist (Interactive Playbook)

An actionable, interactive checklist to screen experiments, prototypes, and pilots for ethical, fairness, privacy, safety, environmental, and regulatory concerns. Designed to capture decisions, owners, residual risks, and recommended mitigations so teams can move faster with documented safeguards.

Interactive Tool

Responsible Innovation Checklist

This checklist helps teams run a fast, practical ethical review for discoveries, prototypes, pilots, and experiments. Use it to surface stakeholder impacts, privacy and bias risks, environmental considerations, regulatory flags, escalation paths, and a recommended decision. This tool is a structured screen and record — it is not a substitute for legal, clinical, or domain expert approval.

Complete the fields with the best available information. Save the checklist so decisions and mitigations are recorded for audits, follow-up, and organisational learning.

Short, recognizable name for the experiment or prototype.
Person or role accountable for the experiment.
YYYY-MM-DD or human-readable date.
List internal and external stakeholders (users, workers, communities, regulators, customers) and how they might be affected.
A stakeholder map documents relationships, influence, and potential impacts.
Describe the primary expected benefits and possible harms for each major stakeholder group.
Rate the worst foreseeable harm if controls fail (1 = Negligible, 5 = Severe / irreversible).
1.0 10.0
Includes identifiable personal data, health data, biometrics, or other sensitive categories.
Be specific (e.g., names, emails, location, health records, transaction logs, sensor data).
1 = Low, 5 = Very high (e.g., re-identification, sensitive data leakage)
1.0 10.0
Data minimization, anonymization, retention limits, access controls, encryption, DPIAs, data-sharing constraints.
Select all that apply and explain below.
E.g., balanced sampling, fairness-aware metrics, human review, ongoing testing across groups.
How will participants be informed, asked for consent, or given opt-outs? Include messaging, timing, and record-keeping.
Technical, operational, and human controls to prevent or limit harm (rate limits, human-in-loop, monitoring, rollback procedures).
Who to notify, timeline, thresholds for escalation, and immediate containment steps.
Select any that may apply so teams know where to seek expert review.
Describe material environmental impacts (energy, waste, emissions) and planned mitigations.
Summarize measures, owners, timelines, and acceptance criteria for risk reduction.
Team judgment after planned mitigations are applied.
Select the recommended course of action.
Person completing or authorising this checklist.
Role or function (e.g., Product Lead, Research Ethics, Compliance).
YYYY-MM-DD or human-readable date.
Links to designs, data inventories, DPIAs, stakeholder feedback, or external reviews.
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