Innovation Monsters in the Sandbox

Abstract

Recent technological advances, from artificial intelligence to genome editing, are made into innovation monsters, that is, demonstrable objects of public admiration or public fear, which do not exist without being displayed, are connected with anticipations of progress or catastrophe, and cause pervasive uncertainties about their future evolutions. In this paper, I investigate the politics of innovation monsters by analyzing recent manifestations of the regulatory sandbox. Heralded by innovation enthusiasts across the globe, many regulatory sandboxes aim to tame innovation monsters. In doing so, they also trust innovation to provide relevant answers to public problems. Other regulatory sandboxes illustrate a shift from a concern with containing risks to the imperative to realize the potential of innovation by suspending the rules suspected to restrain its progress. It feeds an understanding of policy as innovation-based. This innovation-based policy makes innovators central political actors and innovation the engine of permanently destabilized policy action.

PLAIN LANGUAGE SUMMARY

Rapid technological advances in domains such as genome editing and artificial intelligence create expectations and concerns. Innovators often play on anticipations of large-scale consequences, be they positive or negative, to convince private investors and policy-makers of the importance of their projects. The policy-makers who are engaged in the promotion of innovation are also concerned about controlling potential risks. Some of them grant legal exemptions for not yet authorized technologies to be tested and their risks assessed. This approach is described as a regulatory sandbox. It is meant to engage innovators to test their products in controlled conditions. The reasoning is that risks will be assessed and innovation will then extend in safe conditions (but whether innovation should be developed is not asked). Yet designers of some regulatory sandboxes are not interested in control. They insist much more on the need to free innovation from legal constraints. They consider that innovators have solutions to public issues, and that policy-making should be inspired by them. The regulatory sandboxes they use change the role of the state. Rather than having authority on innovation, the state is now expected to constantly adapt to innovation needs. This type of policy-making can be described as an innovation-based policy.

Keywords:

• Regulatory sandbox
• innovation
• disruption

Notes

1 When he urged political ecologists to “love their monsters,” Bruno Latour invited them to pay analytical and political attention to the many attachments that bring technology and society together. Latour’s monsters are the heterogeneous associations that actor-network theory powerfully brought to light (Latour 2011; Law 1991). By contrast, the contemporary innovation monsters functioning within an economy of (positive or negative) anticipation have explicit extraordinary characteristics that are designed for public display.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brice Laurent

Brice Laurent is senior researcher at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) at Mines Paris/PSL Research University. Brice Laurent’s research focuses on the relationships between innovation and democracy, and uses the theoretical approaches and empirical methods of Science and Technology Studies. His current research projects relate to the politics of expertise, the experimental forms of innovation and the controversies related to natural resources for transition objectives. Brice Laurent’s books include Democratic Experiments (2017) and European Objects (2022).