The CDTI Innovation launches its roadmap for responsible and sustainable investment with impact measurement, ethical reinforcement and focus on citizens

The CDTI Innovation, the state innovation agency of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, has just launched its Roadmap for responsible and sustainable investment, an action already contemplated in the Strategic Plan 2024–2027 in the context of the global question of which innovations are desirable, which generate net benefits and which may produce unforeseen effects on social cohesion, rights, equality or the environment.

As stated in the document itself, the Roadmap is a work plan to reorganize its public action and ensure that technological development does not advance at the expense of social cohesion or citizen rights, incorporating criteria such as gender equality, accessibility, privacy and ethics in the evaluation and management of funded projects.

A shift of focus towards full impact

The roadmap is based on a simple but demanding idea: innovation is not neutral. It can accelerate positive transitions (clean energy, health, productivity or inclusion) but it can also amplify inequalities, introduce risks or consolidate gaps if it is not sensibly oriented and governed. It is no longer enough to assess which technology is viable or which project is excellent in scientific-technical terms. Therefore, the Roadmap for responsible and sustainable investment proposes to consolidate a framework of responsible and sustainable innovation aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and ethical principles of international implementation.

Among its antecedents, the Roadmap underlines the objective of adopting or elaborating a code for ethical financing, in line with the principles of the United Nations for Responsible Investment (UNPRI), and the development of a mechanism of ethical monitoring and advice through a committee of responsible innovation with external experts to which both management and technical teams can turn in case of need.

This shift is not limited to the strategic plane but also connects with the evolving regulatory framework. The Roadmap recalls alignment with EU and UN sustainability objectives and places this orientation in continuity with the ongoing statutory reform, reinforcing coherence between mission, governance and public action.

A complete framework: governance, assessment, metrics and transparency

One of the most outstanding elements is its general framework of integration, represented as a work process that runs through the entire cycle: governance aligned with the mission - evaluation of proposals - monitoring and collection of information - treatment and accountability, with a system of social, environmental and governance impact metrics that will be collected in the annual report of the CDTI. The distributed governance scheme ensures that the approach is sustainable over time.  

The Roadmap also incorporates a virtual experimentation space, CDTI-LAB, which will channel changes in the flow of information associated with projects.

Tools of the work plan

The Roadmap is deployed in four major axes, with a specific architecture of instruments and processes.

1) Calls oriented to challenges: Science and Innovation Missions

The document positions Science and Innovation Missions as one of the pieces with the best fit to introduce principles of responsible innovation, due to its explicit orientation to social and environmental challenges and not to specific technological verticals or industrial sectors. The Misiones instrument, focused on promoting a business R&D that provides innovative solutions oriented to specific challenges, is based on principles of co-design and participation and evaluates both technological quality and adequacy to the principles of the mission.

The Roadmap describes a call design that includes consultation with ministerial departments to identify medium and long-term challenges, selection and refinement by CDTI teams, consultation and co-design with stakeholders, and final validation with ministries prior to preparation and launch.

2) Social and environmental criteria in ex ante and ex post evaluation

The document specifies that the order of bases has expanded the weight of social and environmental impact in the evaluation of projects and that, to ensure a substantive assessment, a pilot with ex ante evaluation methodologies is being developed through an experiment with shadow evaluations in collaboration with the Innovation Growth Lab, of which the CDTI Innovation has been a member since 2024, and whose results will allow the profiling of ex ante evaluation tools based on the potential social and environmental impact in addition to determining metrics and criteria for subsequent monitoring.

The approach pursues simple criteria, focused on relative progress and easily identifiable so as not to create additional burdens for companies, especially SMEs.

3) Alliances for socially responsible innovation

The third axis is articulated around the concept that responsible innovation is not built alone. The Roadmap proposes to advance alliances and specifies actions such as collaboration agreements with the CSIC and the Secretary of State for Social Rights and Agenda 2030 to develop a competence center in social innovation; support for a call for AECID on innovation for development participating in its evaluation; work within the framework of TAFTIE for common indicators of social impact; strengthening relationships with spaces such as COTEC Foundation or the Nausika forum; and exchange with other public companies committed to sustainability.

In addition, it foresees a strategic mapping of responsible innovation initiatives and the presentation of the CDTI framework in relevant forums and spaces of cooperation with Autonomous Communities.

4) Accountability: annual report and comparable metrics

The fourth axis focuses on making the impact visible and is probably the most transformative from the public point of view. Therefore, it is proposed to consolidate the sustainability report with the annual report, so as not to separate activity and impact, and it is anticipated that, in 2025, linkage data of the projects financed with the most relevant SDGs will be offered for the first time, as well as examples of projects with positive social and environmental impact.

To achieve this, the CDTI is developing a specific table of metrics, fed by common sources such as the results monitoring survey, harmonized with ex-ante and ex-post evaluation criteria. They are intended to be cross- and longitudinally comparable and approved metrics, citing frameworks such as IRIS as a reference, so that they are useful both for the stakeholders’ community and for citizens.

For the innovative ecosystem, this Roadmap means that the CDTI wants to continue supporting business R&D with technological ambition but with a more complete compass, which incorporates social and environmental impact in an orderly, comparable and reasonable way for companies. For citizens, this Roadmap is a bid to raise the legitimacy of innovation policy, in terms of showing what changes in people’s real lives when technology is funded.  

Overall, this Roadmap presents the CDTI Innovation from the new perspective on how to orient public financing towards an innovation that is not only technologically cutting-edge but also socially robust, ethically accompanied and transparent; an innovation that generates growth and competitiveness but also takes care of the planet, rights and cohesion that helps create a future.

CDTI Innovation

The Center for Technological Development and Innovation, CDTI E.P.E. It is the innovation agency of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, whose objective is the promotion of technological innovation in the business environment. The mission of the CDTI is to ensure that the Spanish business fabric generates and transforms scientific and technical knowledge into globally competitive, sustainable and inclusive growth. In 2024, within the framework of a new strategic plan, the CDTI provided more than 2.3 billion euros of support to Spanish companies and startups.

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