Quick Hits - Innovation Enabling Regulation

A quick summary of some interesting reads

No longer essay today - I’m working on a piece on the need for a vision of where we want Canada to be, and how we can move in that direction, but I’m getting my teeth stuck into it and don’t want to rush it. Instead, another round-up of some interesting reads, with a focus on regulatory innovation. There will be no post on Monday due to Canadian Thanksgiving, so I’ll be back next Wednesday.

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Enjoy the long weekend!

Regulatory Innovation

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash

I bristle at the classic cry from businesses that there is too much regulation and that cutting regulation will unlock productivity growth. These calls are often vague, with no specific regulations identified. And the response from governments is in-kind, with broad red tape reduction efforts, or counter-productive promises of one in, two out, that can never be met in reality.

This isn’t to say that some regulations aren’t plain bad. Or that regulations can’t harm innovation and productivity. But what I want to see is a more nuanced conversation.

Sometimes, society might want to impose regulations that get in the way of businesses for good reason. Stopping acid rain is a great example and something I wrote about a few months ago. Industry decried new regulations as business killing, but the result was better air and water quality for society, and for businesses, they saw innovation and growth in these sectors.

This is the crux. We should design regulations that enable positive societal outcomes and that are pro-innovation. In this, the UK has been doing a lot of interesting work. Most notably, this week the UK Government announced the creation of a new Regulatory Innovation Office. While couched in some of the usual language around cutting red tape, the focus of it is on emerging technologies, with four areas of focus:

• Engineering biology

• Space

• AI & digital in healthcare

• Connected and autonomous technology

As the announcement states, these are cross-cutting technologies that “do not fit neatly into existing regulatory frameworks” which can mean slower adoption in the market. By having a dedicated office in this space, working with government departments and other regulators, the idea is to help create regulatory approaches that still protect societal outcomes but that do so in a way that is innovation-enabling. That is the conversation we should be having.

Now Canada hasn’t been completely out of the loop - there is a federal Centre for Regulatory Innovation, originally announced in the 2018 Fall Economic Statement. As far as I can tell though, it is not a hive of activity, with two reports from 2019 and 2021 and three short case studies of regulatory experiments in light sport aircraft, digital credentials and wallets, and supply chain transparency and labelling for chemicals in products. That does not seem the foundation for a pro-innovation, technology adoption-enabling, society-protecting body. If you know more about their work though then I’d love to chat!

Read More

1. Making the Regulatory Innovation Office a Success - UK Day One: An action-oriented briefing from the excellent organization UK Day One, setting out a detailed plan of how to set the RIO up successfully and make sure it has an impact.

2. Did we just fix the UK’s regulators? - The Form Playbook: Another quick read on some of what the RIO needs to do next to make sure it is successful and leads to a different environment for start-ups.

3. Regulating quantum technology applications - UK Department for Science, Innovation & Technology: Not directly related to the RIO but an example of some thinking happening on how to approach regulation for an emerging technology.

4. Pro-innovation Regulation of Technologies Review: Digital Technologies - Written by the then Government Chief Scientific Advisor, and the now Minister of State for Science, Research and Innovation, this review explores the challenges for innovation and regulation and sets out recommendations for the UK to shift its approach.

Other Quick Hits

There have been a few other interesting things worth reading this week:

Streamlining University Tech Transfer - Over on Kyle Briggs’s excellent CanInnovate newsletter, he has been writing a series of posts on SAIL: Simple Agreement for Innovation Licensing. Canada’s patchwork approach to university-generated IP has often been called out as a problem. The approach Kyle and his collaborators are proposing seeks to address that. Worth reading.

Place and AI Adoption - This NBER paper gets into some place-based policy - exploring whether distance from innovation is a barrier to the adoption of AI. The authors find that “distance reduces growth in AI research jobs as well as in jobs adapting AI to new industries”. While we might feel like we live in a digital world, place and geography matters even at the technological frontier.

Federal Programs for Business Innovation - Senator Colin Deacon has recently published a discussion paper looking at Canada’s support system for innovators. He is calling for responses and feedback and I plan on writing up my thoughts on the topics he and his office raise soon.

Use Government Procurement to Boost Innovation - Finally, Dan Ciuriak and Laurent Carbonneau have an op-ed in the Globe and Mail advocating for a stronger industrial policy that utilizes the power of government procurement to support Canada’s innovation. Their piece is based on their recent report for the Council of Canadian Innovators: Building Winners: Strategic Procurement in the Age of Innovation. Lots of great insights in that report.

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