Regulators must become as creative as innovators

As a newly divided Congress is sworn in, the American government will once again be brought into a political balance between Democrats and Republicans.

Even federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration, which have worked out an agreement to share their responsibilities on regulating controversial-yet-promising cell-based meat, are apparently following suit in their own way. 

{mosads}Unfortunately, this doesn’t pose much hope for balance. Both agencies are good at regulating traditional industries, but neither is good at regulating innovative technology.

To allow previously far-fetched tech to translate to healthier, better lives, we urgently need a new kind of balance in our regulatory agencies — one that lies between being analytical and creative.

Creative thinking is generative and imaginative. In addition to seeking new answers to problems, it often seeks to change the underlying question we’re trying to solve.

Creative thinking focuses on possibilities and opportunities and is open-ended in terms of how we get there. Analytical thinking, on the other hand, focuses on finding ways to apply solutions that have been used before with well-defined problems. It’s focused on probabilities and closed sets of solutions.

Put another way, analytical thinkers apply accepted principles while creative thinkers disregard them. Both are needed in a successful organization to manage emerging technology.

In practice, creative thinkers are more likely to understand entrepreneurs and what they need to be successful. This is why they’re so critical today in the government agencies we entrust to engage with entrepreneurs.

The pace of innovation in 2019 and the competition we face from the rest of the world mean we cannot treat entrepreneurialism in the same manner we treat stable, traditional industries.

In his book “The Singularity Is Near,” Ray Kuzweil explains that technology is advancing at an increasing rate. “Moore’s Law,” first laid out in 1965, correctly predicted that computer chips would exponentially increase their capability while decreasing in cost.

Although Moore’s Law may be slowing for chips, we are now seeing exponential growth in areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the internet of things (including blockchain) and augmented reality. 

Today’s government agencies, some of which were founded over 100 years ago, have been given the responsibility to regulate these new technologies alongside the older, more stable industries. 

Some scholars have already begun to suggest that the answer is to return to older regulatory schemes, such as requiring new products to be approved before they go to market (as is done today for drugs, medical devices and food additives). 

It’s no surprise that this misguided approach is resurfacing. People charged with public safety tend to favor precautionary measures, regulating early and often based on the perceived (and even slim or unlikely) possibility of risk.

In fact, the “precautionary principle” all too often halts promising technology that has not yet been proven safe. The popular genetic test 23andMe, for example, was halted for two years simply because it wasn’t approved. 

{mossecondads}23andMe did manage to relaunch — with a scaled back version — but that product barely scratches the surface of what is possible by bringing big data, artificial intelligence and the internet of things together to disrupt the health-care industry.

Allowed to flourish, these technologies will enable creative people to explore not-yet-imagined new possibilities that can make our lives healthier, happier and longer.  

The late, renowned political scientist James Q. Wilson observed that the structure of agencies stifles creativity: “Government organizations are especially risk averse because they are caught up in a web of constraints that any change is likely to rouse the ire of some important constituency.”  Exactly, and that is the problem.

Perhaps the answer is to look within current government agencies that are more focused on enhancing creativity and bringing new technologies to reality, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

{mossecondads}Created in 1958, its job is to “explicitly reach for transformational change instead of incremental advances.” As one former director says, DARPA is “a place where individuals reach beyond their grasp, and where the only failure is small dreams.”

This is not to suggest that DARPA, which focuses on purchasing new technologies for the Department of Defense, not regulating other technologies, would be able to strike the perfect balance between the enormous benefits new technologies have to offer and the risks we might face.

But having creative people and a creative culture that moves away from the precautionary state where most of our current agencies reside and toward one that encourages experimentation is needed. 

It is somewhere between these two approaches where our best possible future resides. It must start with the idea that we need creative people as a part of that process.

Richard Williams is a senior affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a former director for social sciences with the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.