Innovation Implemented by Public-private Co-creation - Challenges of the Regulatory Sandbox - (Japanese)

The Regulatory Sandbox is a new system that was established under the Law on Special Measures for Productivity Enhancement (enacted in 2018) and made permanent with the revised Industrial Competitiveness Enhancement Law. It is a framework for suspending existing regulations within a defined time period and scope of participants that was established to allow for rapid trials of new technologies and business models related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In some cases, the Regulatory Sandbox system has led to legal revisions in the Road Traffic Law, Building Lots and Building Transaction Law, Land and Building Lease Law, and Industrial Competitiveness Law (a special exception to the Civil Code). Based on the past five years of the system’s operation, we will conduct research on the policy, which represents the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The structure of this paper is as follows: First, from the perspective of the administrative officials who established the system, we will provide an overview of the system and explain the foundation for the system, which is the method that is used to eliminate the bottlenecks that exist between new ideas and their public implementation. Then, we will analyze a case study from the perspective of the government officials who were actually involved in the operation of the system and who worked hard to undertake this project in cooperation with startups and regulatory agencies. Finally, as policy suggestions to promote further public-private co-creation innovation, we will discuss from various perspectives; (1) the future of rulemaking and policy makers, (2) the momentum for strengthening support for startups, which are the main players in the era of the fourth industrial revolution, and (3) new developments in the legal functions of companies.