In what ways is the UK regulatory environment helping / hindering the plans and activities of innovators? Is it becoming more friendly or less friendly to innovators over time? Methodologically, what is the best way of measuring the health of the UK regulatory environment over time?

Background

"Technology Strategy

As the team has a broad remit, there are a range of different areas of evidence needs. These are likely to be areas of ongoing enquiry, as we seek to keep abreast of market and technological developments. We are also interested in the interaction of these issues e.g. with systems approaches.


Evidence challenges
One of the main challenges we have is that SIC codes do not readily permit us to do analysis of technology sectors, so we need to use specialist datasets, bespoke studies or natural language processing to enable us to collect data on the issues.

We work with technology experts to define classifying methods.

How evidence is used
We already have databases on business activity and equity funding in the team, with access to other datasets across the Department on research activity, exports, skills, patents, IP, etc. We are nevertheless always interested in hearing about new data developments in this space.

We also have evidence from commissioned studies, and call for evidence responses.

Pro-Innovation Regulation
How evidence is used
The Pro-Innovation Regulation team wants to strengthen its evidence base to better support all parts of the policy cycle:
• Understanding the current health of regulatory and standards frameworks would help develop the rationale for our team’s work.
• Understanding the barriers / opportunities faced by regulators, policy makers and standard-setting agencies would help the team target its efforts.
• Understanding ‘what works’ in terms of approaches to supporting innovation through regulation and standards would help the team develop interventions that have impact.
• Evaluating existing government policies would help demonstrate ‘value for money’.
• Improving our research methods would help us generate better evidence in the future.
Scope of policy interests
The ‘Pro-Innovation Regulation’ policy area:
• Takes a very strategic cross-cutting interest in regulation. We are primarily interested in the UK regulatory system as a whole. But we are interested in regulation / standards in relation to particular technologies / sectors as well, particularly where it reveals more generalisable insights.
• Takes a very broad view of the definition of innovation. We are involved in very early-stage technologies (like quantum computing and fusion energy production) through to technologies which are already reaching markets (like drones and neurotechnology).
• Recognises the diversity of organisations that are involved in innovation – including academic researchers, start-ups, scale ups and established large firms.
• Recognises that regulatory opportunities and challenges are not unique to the UK. We are therefore open to learning from international experiences and examples of good practice.
• Is primarily interested in the role of regulation / standards in supporting innovation. But we are also interested in how regulators / standards bodies can use data / technology to support their work (e.g. in making the regulatory environment easier to navigate or enabling more effective risk-based compliance).
Evidence challenges
We are interested in all kinds of evidence (qualitative or quantitative) which are relevant to our research questions. But we recognise that it can be challenging to generate quantitative evidence in our policy area:
• It often doesn’t lend itself to experimental methods. Because regulation is a system-level intervention, opportunities to use Randomised Control Trials are limited.
• Large-sample survey methods have been used in the past (e.g. UK Innovation Survey) to understand innovators perceptions but these have limited coverage of emerging technologies.
• Measuring the impact of government policies is also challenging because of the long time - horizons involved and the difficulties in separating the impacts of regulation from other policies (e.g. investment, skills).

As such, much of the existing research in this field is qualitative (case studies, in-depth interviews) and evaluation is typically theory-based.
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