Innovation Communities for transformative technologies: enabling safe and sustainable innovation in interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral projects

Innovation-driven projects are increasingly complex, requiring interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral, and international collaboration to address global challenges. While frameworks such as Responsible Research and Innovation, Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design, and Life-Cycle-Thinking promote ethical and sustainability perspectives, little guidance exists on how to embed these values in practice. Research consortia, often composed of technical experts and early-career researchers, struggle to integrate such frameworks under competing demands and limited coordination capacity.This paper explores the potential of Innovation Communities (ICs), an adapted, small-scale Communities of Practice approach, as a tool to facilitate collaboration, knowledge exchange, reflexive decision-making and anticipatory reflection within diverse projects. Drawing on two organically developed ICs and two Horizon Europe interdisciplinary biotechnology projects, we derive practical interventions for establishing and coordinating ICs. Our findings suggest that ICs can support the early embedding of Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design principles from the outset, foster open dialogue on cross-cutting challenges, and cultivate a culture of collaboration and shared societal purpose across disciplines and sectors.