🇪🇪 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
It’s hard not to pause when you come across a public sector programme whose motto is “making illegal things legal.” That line belongs to Accelerate Estonia, an innovation lab in the country’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, set up to identify and fix regulatory barriers to innovation. I first came across it in a characteristically insightful episode of the Statecraft podcast, discussing Estonia’s digital state.
Accelerate Estonia helps businesses overcome obstacles by shaping policy and, where needed, proposing legislative changes, so innovative ideas can operate lawfully from Estonia rather than stalling in a sandbox or moving overseas. Applicants are filtered for a clear need for regulatory change, scalability potential, and a ready-to-pilot concept. The focus is explicitly B2B/B2C rather than selling to government. This model sets ambition (open a market) and backs it with the unglamorous mechanics that move the needle.
What stands out is the delivery discipline. Validation stage (1-3 months) tests whether there’s a genuine legislative issue, the likely economic impact, and whether the solution is mature enough to pilot. Definition stage (3-6 months) turns that diagnosis into a delivery plan: pinning down the rule change required, the pilot and impact analysis, stakeholders and budget, and the specific R&D value. Proof stage (6-18 months) is focused on execution – draft the amendment, run the pilot, carry out the public-private cooperation plan. Finally, the results/aftercare stage presents the amendment to relevant parts of government, communicates the newly opened market, concludes cooperation, and reports the R&D value.
The method has proven to work in various domains. In health, Accelerate Estonia and the Ministry of Social Affairs have taken a self-service pharmacy model to the finish line, with amendments to the Medicinal Products Act now being introduced so 24/7 automated dispensing can legally enter the market. In education, a pilot led to draft changes to the Basic School and Upper Secondary School Act to let schools procure teaching from external providers.
As the UK builds out the Regulatory Innovation Office, tasked with reducing the burden on businesses bringing new products and services to market by supporting regulators in updating rules and speeding up approvals, Accelerate Estonia could offer a lesson in how to operationalise it. In practice, that would likely mean pairing pilots with a relevant regulator from day one, running regulatory analysis alongside technical work, and defining ‘graduation’ as a safe, evidence-based rule change that opens a market.
🏗️ Philip Salter, Founder
Over on Slow Boring, Matthew Yglesias dishes out some useful policy advice to those looking to get more housing built in the US. Yglesias argues that campaigners shouldn’t ditch YIMBYism’s single‑issue focus while building out a broader, moderate urban reform coalition that links housing to public safety, transport and schools.
This strikes me as correct and more widely applicable. Whether you agree with them or not, the success of campaigns by the likes of the Living Wage Foundation, Migration Watch and the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) testifies to the power of single‑issue focus (or perhaps monomania in some cases).
As a generalist, I’m grateful for single‑issue specialists – both the internal and external authors of our reports and, more broadly, those whose outside ideas we can adopt. For example, in our own work on planning reform – the topic of Yglesias’s article – we integrate ideas from specialists beyond our domain: Samuel Hughes and Ben Southwood on Street Votes; Paul Cheshire on the Green Belt; Ant Breach on change‑of‑use rules; and Tim Leunig on land auctions.Our added value is to make the case through the lens of entrepreneurship and to build a coalition of entrepreneurs who back these reforms.
I often quote the 33rd US president – “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit” – especially when another organisation claims credit for something we’ve helped to make happen. But the truth is that we’re all part of an ecosystem that relies on coalitions to bring about the change we want to see in the world.
📈 Eamonn Ives, Research Director
For the last two weeks, there’s been a sentence from the latest chapter in Jason Crawford’s peerless Techno-Humanist Manifesto that I’ve struggled to shake from my head:
“[A]nnual growth rates in world GDP were less than a hundredth of a percent in the stone age, a fraction of a percent in the agricultural age, and single-digit percentage points in the industrial age. If this pattern continues, a fourth age would eventually produce sustained double-digit growth, meaning a world economy doubling time measured in years.”
If past performance is any guide, future economic revolutions will arrive faster than the last. We may now be at a point where people alive today could live through multiple eras in a single lifetime.
There are no prizes for guessing which technology is poised to usher in the next such one. Just as steam powered our transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy, artificial intelligence may do the same for cognitive work – potentially propelling us towards unimaginable levels of prosperity, as autonomous robots relieve us of countless tasks and AI helps unravel the mysteries of the universe.
Given the speed of recent AI breakthroughs, it’s easy to assume that its continuing advance is inevitable. But that would be a mistake. Every epoch defining technology has had to contend with political constraints and public scepticism – and these are forces that no model, no matter how advanced, can necessarily navigate alone.
We should expect plenty of ‘Red Flag Acts’ which curtail AI deployment in sensitive areas like autonomous vehicles, healthcare or criminal justice. And don’t forget – even centuries after agricultural mechanisation began, large parts of the world’s farming industry would be disappointingly familiar to our ancestors. The diffusion of innovation is seldom as smooth or swift as we might wish.
For all its transformative potential, AI’s impact will depend not just on computational power, but also conventional politics. Unless we grapple with that fact, the future may unfold more slowly – and unevenly – than many anticipate.