Border controls at its best.

⚠️ 3.7 tonnes of cocaine seized.
⚠️ £302 million estimated street value.
⚠️ Largest seizure of cocaine in the UK since 2015.

Thanks to UK Border Force officers who’ve been working with National Crime Agency (NCA) to crack down on drug supply chains.

Today the new football season 2022 starts in Sweden. My club Malmö FF has won the last two championship of the Swedish first division (Allsvenskan) and today the journey for a third title in a row starts with an away game agoanst Kalmar.

Malmö FF is the most successful club in Sweden ever with 22 championships and we habe won the Swedish footbLl Cup 14 times.

This year we will win our 23rd title.

Any entrepreneur will tell you that regulation not only lags but often inhibits innovation.

At the Global Entrepreneurship Congress, hosted in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Digital Nation Australia spoke to Céline Kauffman, head of the entrepreneurship, SME and tourism division at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

As the OECD, a global policy forum made up of governments, policymakers and citizens from over 100 countries, delivers advice on public policies and international standard-setting, Kauffman revealed a key focus area is to make regulation more agile.



“The problem that you have with regulation and innovation is twofold. On the one hand, you don’t want to prevent new ideas, innovation, entrepreneurship. But on the other hand, regulation is in place to protect consumers.

“You don’t want to lower too much your level of protection just to let the business prosper, because you never know what’s going to happen,” she said.

Jonathan Potter, head of the entrepreneurship policy unit at the OECD described to Digital Nation Australia the challenges that he has observed for a biotechnology and advanced agriculture project in northern Thailand, where innovation has run ahead of regulation.

The organisation is developing medicinal food products that need to be certified by the Food and Drug Administration of Thailand. But with the Thai FDA facing resource limitations, product authorisation decisions are being delayed for up to two years, he said.

“This is a fast-moving market, the start-up world — you can’t delay. They’re actually going off to Singapore, to get an FDA license,” said Potter. “We are simply advising governments to invest more in keeping up with the progress.”

According to Kauffman, the OECD’s regulatory policy committee is looking to address how regulation can become “innovation-friendly”, so as not to prevent entrepreneurship and the emergence of new ideas.

“Once you have regulation in place it requires a lot of compliance and it’s top-down. You have the police and so on. So having on the side softer tools like guidance, or to observe a bit the landscape before you regulate is, for example, a good practice.”

Regulatory sandboxes

One mechanism that can be adopted in order to soften the restrictive nature of regulation, is a regulatory sandbox, where organisations are free to experiment, within reason.

“[Regulatory sandboxes are] a protected area where you don’t regulate for a while, you tell companies, ‘You’re free within these boundaries — don’t kill anyone — to operate’. We let you innovate, we let you develop new products for a certain time, like one year, two years, and then we see what happens,” said Kauffman.

“But we don’t stifle your capacity to innovate. Then in two years’ time, we revisit and we see if there’s a need for regulation.”

Innovation checks

Another mechanism available to regulators is innovation checks, which keep innovation and entrepreneurship front of mind when creating policies.

Despite describing them as a “tick box exercise”, this kind of fitness check encourages policymakers to question the effects of the regulation on innovators, she said.

“Policymakers, whenever they develop new legislation or regulation, they have on their mind, am I affecting entrepreneurship? Am I affecting start-ups? Am I affecting innovation? In which way? And if it’s negative, how can I remediate the negative impacts?”

Source: DigitalNation