Regulatory Sandbox: A protected playing field between the Law and Innovative Entrepreneurship? - Ninad Mohan Haibat

Ninad Mohan Haibat was the recipient of the School of Law's 2022 LLM Dissertation Award for his dissertation ‘Regulatory Sandbox: A protected playing field between the Law and Innovative Entrepreneurship?’

Abstract

With every passing era, the world gains from new discoveries that advance humankind. Thanks to new technologies, inventions, and innovations, conventional markets are being disrupted while new ones are being originated. These technologies are reshaping different facets of economy, society and everyday lives of human beings. With advancements taking place at an accelerating rate, legislatures confront the dual challenge of encouraging new market entries while also comprehending the complexity of the legal framework entailed in order to align policies suitably.

Even while there is widespread consensus that encouraging innovations should be a priority, there is significantly less agreement on how to achieve this “legally”. Arguably, regulation is not the optimal lens for extenuating the challenges posed by technology, as it can never rival the innovativeness of innovations. In the context of rapid technological changes, the contours of legal and regulatory action are not always pronounced. Given this uncertainty, the risk-benefit calculus often merits an equilibrium between the Law and Innovations. In this scenario, among the regulatory endeavours, the Regulatory Sandbox (“Sandbox”) emerged as one of the leading experimental tools for nurturing the true potential of innovation.

The impetus for authoring this article stems from the belief that we require an emergent formulation for regulating the innovations and technologies. Overall, this dissertation uncovers and contributes to the conceptualisation of the Sandbox and examines whether such a new mechanism is warranted to protect the Innovative Entrepreneurship. More broadly, this dissertation adds nuances to prior studies that tout significance of Sandboxes and adopts a qualitative analysis approach to examine significance of Sandboxes.

You can read the full dissertation at: https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/law/students/publications/

Author information

Ninad Mohan Haibat (LL.M, Corporate and Financial Laws, University of Glasgow, 2022)

The author is a legal professional with more than ten years of experience in the Private Equity, Venture Capital, Investment Funds, and Asset Management industry.