Responsible Innovation Centre for Public Media Futures

The Responsible Innovation Centre for Public Media Futures (RIC) is a research centre hosted by the BBC. It is funded primarily by UKRI, a non-departmental public body that directs UK research and innovation funding. Working with the BBC and a world-leading partner network of organisations helping to advance technology in the public interest, RIC helps ensure a strong and resilient public service media sector now and in the future.

Developments in technology continue to disrupt the media landscape in ways that threaten to destabilise foundational public values such as trust and universality. Today, technology and content are deeply intertwined. This creates new challenges and risks for public service media when trying to innovate in the public interest and deliver their public purposes. Ensuring technologies work for public service media, audiences and society calls for more than technical knowledge and proficiency; it requires deep expertise in the legal, social, ethical and editorial implications and impacts of technologies and increased investment into the capabilities to do the necessary anticipatory, interdisciplinary and collaborative work.

At RIC, we believe that to ensure a strong and resilient public service media sector in the future we need:

• Clarity on the problems, and what’s at stake. By interrogating available evidence and developing insight to fill knowledge gaps, RIC deepens understanding of long-terms challenges facing public service media organisations and their audiences in a digital age. 

• Making complex socio-technical systems and their impacts more understandable. RIC bridges research and professional practice and social and technical contexts to help us work together to solve some of the biggest problems and envision better futures.

• Bringing together different ideas, experiences and skills. RIC creates spaces for interdisciplinary conversations and collaborative work, helping bring together diverse groups, surface different perspectives and work through competing ideas to advance shared views and plans that can lead to collective action and catalyse progress.

• Identifying practical steps to address problems and turn new ideas into reality. RIC translates research insights, evidence and big ideas into recommendations, guidance and tools that support practical steps to be taken.

We focus our research on the following challenges:

• Civic participation online
• Digital inclusion
• Personalisation and the public interest 
• Public value, technology and innovation
• Responsible AI and news
• Youth voices and public service media futures

Our work 

Read our latest reports and insights which lay the groundwork for the topics we cover. And explore our wider work through podcasts and collaborative research papers which we’ve contributed to.

Responsible AI and Public Service Journalism

Digitally Inclusive Futures for Public Service Media and their Audiences

Measuring the Public Value of Technology and Innovation

Public Service Media in an Age of Personalisation

Youth Participation to Shape the Digital Future of Public Service Media

Public Service Media and Democracy in a Digital Age

Building a public interest approach to AI in the news

A digitally inclusive vision for public service media

Measuring the public value of technology and innovation

The personalisation dilemma in public service media: ways forward

A digital future created with young people, for young people

Public service media and democracy in the digital age

Supporting AI Literacies for Young Adults

Inside R&D: Innovation Explained - Value for all? Why the future of media needs young voices

Protecting public values in a digital age

Coming soon

• Insights from a public deliberation on public service media, technology and innovation  
• A digital innovation toolkit for public media organisations and practitioners 

Our partners

• BRAID - Bridging Responsible AI Divides, University of Edinburgh
• Digital Good Network, University of Sheffield
• AI Media and Democracy Lab, University of Amsterdam
• Centre for Digital Citizens, University of Newcastle 
• International Association of Public Media Researchers 
• Ada Lovelace Institute 
• Open Data Institute
• Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics  
• The Centre for Digital Politics, Media and Democracy, University of Liverpool  
• ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster University
• Horizon Digital Economy Research, University of Nottingham
• Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy, University of Cambridge 
• Communication and Media Research Institute, University of Westminster

Our independence

RIC is hosted by the BBC Research & Development department (BBC R&D) but operates with financial and research independence. Funded by UKRI through a £1.9 million UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship grant, RIC sets its own research agenda and makes its own recommendations.

The BBC’s support of RIC stems from its commitments under the Royal Charter to promote technological innovation in the public interest, seeking to share its work openly for wider industry, policy, academic and public benefit.

Work with us

We work with researchers, industry experts and more to help inform our insights and recommendations. If you or your team is working on something similar or want to hear more about what we’ve produced, email responsible.innovation@bbc.co.uk