The aim of the report is to make the synergies between the EU’s different regulatory sandboxes explicit. A specific focus is on the role of and coordination among public authorities in respect to AI-driven innovation, with the aim to prevent silo management by giving concrete examples of how the initiatives interact and complement each other. We provide insights in how regulatory sandboxes, and similar initiatives, can be explored together, even if some will not come into force until 2029.

In short, our analysis is that regulatory sandboxes shall support innovation by clarifying how to apply certain rules to innovative systems and technologies. This is done with the involvement of relevant authorities and under contextual constraints.

The similarities across EU’s regulatory sandboxes, and the overlap in scope, opens for a governance structure that focuses on regulatory guidance for innovative and complex products, instead of establishing silo management based on individual regulations.

The AI Act establishes regulatory sandboxes for AI-driven innovation. From our study we propose to start now, through the regulatory sandboxes established by the Interoperable Europe Act and the Net-Zero Industry Act, and transfer the understanding of how to establish and govern regulatory sandboxes to AI regulatory sandboxes and related initiatives, such as the Cyber Resilience Act and the European Health Data Space.

This report is a deliverable from the pre-study Forsa, which is a research project funded by the Swedish innovation agency and conducted by Theo Andersson, Mats Snäll and Jeanna Åkerman at the Swedish Agency for Digital Government and Håkan Burden and Susanne Stenberg at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden.