UN/DESA Policy Brief #123: Sandboxing and Experimenting Digital Technologies for Sustainable Development

From innovation hubs and policy experiments to regulatory sandboxes

Digital technologies carry a promise to fast track sustainable development by supporting innovative, forwarding-looking policies and digital government solutions. There are, however, numerous risks and complexities of frontier technologies that come along with those opportunities, as well as policy and regulatory challenges such as those related to inclusion, competition, privacy and security.

Innovation hubs, incubators, accelerators or testbeds have since emerged as springboards for new technologies and are now common in many developed and developing countries. In some scenarios, however, the perceived risks and costs of failure in public sector innovation mean that policymakers and regulators may still prefer to stick to the status quo. Read more here.