Conceptualizing the Regulatory Impact of Disruptive Innovation: Compression and Legacy in Professional Ecologies

Paper submitted to the SPRU DPhil Day, University of Sussex

This paper reviews the literature on the political economy of regulation, and argues that increased attention to the roles of professions and time can bring greater analytical strength to the study of innovation. In particular, this paper is interested in the impact of disruptive innovations on regulatory capacity and process. This reverses the causal arrow generally assumed in the literature that deals with how regulation can support or foster innovation. The first part of the article reviews the literature on regulation, identifies some of its assumptions and clarifies how it deals with the concept of innovation. The second part of the article explains what is meant by disruptive innovations and how the current literature is ill equipped to investigate their regulatory impact. The third and final part of the article proposes a theoretical framework that is suited to redress some of the shortcomings identified by drawing on the ideas of linked ecologies and time horizons.

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