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A symposium entitled ‘For a responsible research and innovation’ was held on January 15, 2021. Organized by an inter-institutional working group (universities, research institutes, Grandes Écoles), it aimed to reexamine the role and practices of research. The roundtables organized covered themes related to the societal goals of research for a better alignment with the challenges of sustainable development; to concrete challenges relating to the management of sites and changes in individual and collective behaviors to reduce the environmental and societal cost of conducting research; to the challenges of learning and governance of research and innovation to accompany changes in practices at the scale of all the actors involved. This report proposes to analyze this conference in the light of a macro/micro/meso grid that offers a means of apprehending the different levels that alternated within this conference, sometimes even within the same roundtable. The macro level was mainly covered in the first two roundtables and highlighted the fact that the global norms that now guide research have significantly evolved. Reference was often made to the micro level to talk about the multiplication of initiatives taken by researchers, individually or organized in groups, to reduce the impact of their research on the environment. The meso level is finally the one that has been the most covered in the debates, with a series of instruments, tools and initiatives taken by different organizations to try, at the scale of larger collectives, to take charge of certain challenges and to manage tensions between contradictory injunctions coming from the macro level in order to help move the lines and to commit research more towards responsible practices.