Filling successive technologically-induced governance gaps: Meta-organizations as regulatory innovation intermediaries

Successive digital innovations create technologically-induced governance gaps that make public regulation quickly obsolete and that might be filled by sectoral governance. The literature has shown that most sectoral governance happens at the level of meta-organizations, organizations whose members are themselves organizations, although we lack a temporal understanding of this phenomenon. Further, while regulation is generally understood as a salient function of innovation intermediaries, the literature on innovation intermediaries has focused mostly on other functions such as idea sourcing, knowledge sharing, or capacity building. We know relatively little about regulatory innovation intermediaries, especially how they might evolve in response to the emergence of technologically-induced governance gaps. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth case study of the evolutions of the FinTech sector in France over almost 30 years, using more than 3000 min of interviews, 4500 pages of archives, and non-participant observations. We study three successive (non)digital financial innovations: business angels, crowdfunding platforms for SMEs, and blockchain technologies. We develop a meta-organizational analysis to investigate meta-organizations as regulatory innovation intermediaries. We describe the evolutions and interrelations of new technologies and meta-organizations, and unpack mechanisms of meta-organizational capacity building for multiple contributors, effects of innovation on organizationality and trajectories of meta-organizational filiation.