How distinguishing between Innovator, Steward and Catalyst roles can help regulators achieve their innovation goals.
The COVID-19 pandemic helped highlight the interconnectedness of innovation and regulation and the positive role that regulation can play in the innovation process. As the pandemic began, the most optimistic predictions put a safe, effective, widely distributed vaccine years into the future, in part based on the historical process for regulatory approval of new vaccines, yet, regulatory approval for a first COVID vaccine was achieved in the UK by December 2020.
This extraordinary achievement was not, of course, attributable only or even mainly to regulatory dynamism. It built on decades of scientific research, valuable experience from earlier pandemics and, no doubt, a good deal of luck. That said, it is an example of the critical role of regulators in relation to innovation and raises the question – what could be possible as we look to tackle other massive climate, health and financial crises?
Against the context of emerging and maturing technologies and these significant global challenges, there has been increasing focus on what is regulated, the practice of regulation and the connection between regulation and innovation. Regulators in widespread jurisdictions have been adopting more proactive and iterative approaches to regulation. The approaches taken vary depending on the particular problems faced by the regulator and their specific industry, and many of the approaches are themselves still developing. Nesta and Challenge Works have explored the concept of “regulatory innovation” through:
- Research and practical recommendations related to ‘anticipatory regulatory’, a set of behaviours and tools to help regulators and governments identify, build and test solutions to emerging challenges in rapidly changing markets.
- Directly supporting regulators to identify, develop and test innovative products and services and gather learning to inform their regulatory regimes through the design and delivery of challenge prizes and innovation funds.
- Working with the Centre for Regulatory Innovation in Canada to facilitate regulatory experimentation and ‘sandboxes’ both through consultancy support to regulators and development of the Regulators’ Experimentation Toolkit.
Each of these projects had different objectives, required working with different stakeholders and gave slightly different meaning to the words “regulatory innovation”. As it’s become clear regulators can play varied roles related to regulation and innovation, our team developed the following framework: regulator as Innovator, regulator as Steward and regulator as Catalyst. In defining these three roles, we hope regulators and stakeholders can adopt a common language and more easily evaluate the skills, culture and tools required to achieve their innovation objectives.