Generative Spaces: Collaboration, Learning and Innovation in a Regulatory Sandbox

Abstract

Abstract Public administrators are increasingly called upon to create “generative spaces” that foster emergent processes of collaboration, learning and innovation. This article presents an inductive and ethnographically grounded study of one relatively novel but increasingly popular generative space—a regulatory sandbox. A regulatory sandbox is a controlled and defined space and set of processes that are established by regulators to work with innovators to collaboratively explore, test and learn about early-stage products and innovations and understand emerging regulatory implications. Investigating a sandbox to explore the regulation of new artificial intelligence technologies conducted by a national healthcare regulator, we identify the organizing practices of the sandbox that make it “generative” of collaboration, learning and innovation. An inductive analysis identified three key organizing practices: providing distinct and varied social spaces separated from normal regulatory demands (protection); enabling participants to collaboratively examine innovations and iteratively develop new knowledge and regulation (adaptation); and supporting focused and immersive examination of innovations from a diverse range of perspectives (participation). A theoretically-driven secondary analysis suggests that generative spaces can be understood as liminal experiences that foster detachment, equivalence and reconstruction.