Our paper reprises the concept deep institutionalisation of responsible innovation considering why and how it matters to add the adjective ‘deep’. We distinguish de facto responsible research and innovation (rri) as the study of how actors frame and govern responsibility through existing practices (‘in the wild’) and investigate how these practices become institutionalised. We present a diagnostic framework comprising four axes which facilitates the critical and reflexive empirical interrogation of deep institutionalisation (DI). Deploying the framework, the paper explores DI in two very different cases: an inter-organisational case of Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) in Bolivia; and an intra-organisational case of societal engagement within TNO in the Netherlands. Controversially perhaps, we argue that normative features of responsibility are enacted, amplified and potentially institutionalised through markets. Both cases show how particular market features become recursively qualified through the four mutually reinforcing processes that comprise deep institutionalisation: (i) historical contingency; (ii) institutional amplification; (iii) systemic overflowing; and (iv)multi-level alignment.