Quintuple Helix

By Friso van Houdt

Our ELSA Lab consortium is specifically designed to comprehend, and engage with, the complex, multi-layered, and contextual nature of public safety issues in advanced knowledge-based societies. Our point of departure is that a radical change is needed in the way in which scientific research is being conducted in the face of public safety challenges and this especially applies to the development of AI applications, which directly pervade the lifeworld of citizens.

This need for a radical change is reflected in the general rationale for the emergence of the quintuple helix innovation model (Carayannis and Campbell 2010). This model includes the Triple Helix of (1) academia, (2) industry/businesses, and (3) state/government (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000), yet adds as a fourth helix (4) civil society and the public at large (Carayannis and Campbell, 2006, 2009) and as a fifth helix (5) non-human actors and multi-species justice (cf. Carayannis and Campbell, 2010).

The triple helix innovation model rightly aimed at emphasising the role of universities and governments in knowledge production and innovation processes, alongside businesses and industry. Furthermore, the quadruple helix innovation model claims that in advanced knowledge-based societies the inclusion of citizens and civil society is necessary for innovation power and economic considerations, on the one hand, and democratic legitimisation and an ecosystem of trust on the other hand. To account for non-human actors and more-than-human concerns, a fifth helix is added that encourages inter-species thinking, transdisciplinary application of interdisciplinary knowledge and multi-species justice.