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Regulatory Sandboxes

Contact: Knut Blind.

The increasing speed of science and technology is challenging the existing regulatory frameworks and increases the likelihood that regulations are obstacles to innovation. Therefore, the European Commission offers Innovation Deals as voluntary cooperation agreements between the EU, innovators, and national, regional and local authorities. Their objective is at first to gain an in-depth understanding of how an EU rule or regulation works in practice, but at secondly also to change the regulatory framework, if it is found to be an obstacle to innovations. At the national level, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energyoffers regulatory sandboxes as facilities for testing the relationship between innovation and regulation. They aim to enable innovations to be tested under real-life conditions operated for a limited period of time and across a set area. They are intended to allow for the testing of both new technologies and business models, which are only partially compatible with the existing legal and regulatory framework. The purpose of regulatory sandboxes is to learn about the opportunities and risks that a particular innovation carries and to develop the right regulatory environment to accommodate it.

We are interested in theses, which investigate innovation deals and regulatory sand boxes as case studies, but also in more conceptual, theoretical and even large scale empirical investigations. In addition to innovation management and policy, political economy and science, but even behavioral economics might serve a theoretical base for the theses.