Creative Regulatory Environments: Sandboxes at the Intersection of Regulation and Innovation in an Era of Transition

Although there is an ever-increasing demand for innovation (disruption, entrepreneurship, etc.) and regulation (product compliance, economic security), we currently are only starting to understand the conditions for simultaneously stimulating operator and regulator creativity in times of emergent technologies. This work addresses a significant gap in the literature by considering the factors that encourage new knowledge by commercial actors while fostering supervision sophistication. We argue that regulatory sandboxes are place-based institutional devices that allow for pre-adaptive congruence of future technology-rules complexes. We draw from examples from the telecommunications and energy sectors.