Intended Consequences: How to Build Market-Leading Companies with Responsible Innovation

CHAPTER 12

POLICY PARTNERSHIPS

Technology moves faster than governments. That was true even 100 years ago, when automobiles entered the mainstream. Invented in the 1890s, the number of cars in the United States exploded in the 1910s from 200,000 to 2.5 million. The machines scared horses and endangered pedestrians, who had never before encountered anything moving down a road at 20 miles per hour. The state of Georgia classified cars as ferocious animals. There were almost no laws regulating cars or traffic. The first traffic light went up in 1914 in Cleveland. As late as 1930, a dozen states had no speed limit and 28 states didn’t require drivers to have a license.

Government couldn’t keep up back then, when technology developed at a more human ...