Documented examples

The move, and what it needed

The National Assembly legislated a futures research institute attached to the National Assembly and gave it a statutory mandate for long-range national strategy, so parliament holds its own foresight capacity independent of the government of the day.

Preconditions

• Cross-party support for a statute rather than a Speaker's initiative that could lapse
• A parliamentary research ecosystem (budget office, research service, library) to house it beside
• A domestic research community the institute can recruit from

The move, and what it needed

Planning, budgeting and economic coordination were placed in one central institution, giving government a durable route to align public investment with industrial priorities and private-sector expansion.

Preconditions

• A centre of government with authority over development priorities and budgets
• Administrative capacity to turn plans into financing and implementation
• Firms able to respond to coordinated infrastructure, credit and export policy

The move, and what it needed

The state gives people a legal route to move their own data between providers, shifting data access from a private platform choice toward a user-directed right.

Preconditions

• A privacy authority able to define consent and portability rules
• Interoperable data formats and secure transfer channels
• Providers willing and able to respond to a person's authorised request

The move, and what it needed

The Ministry of Employment and Labor refunded employers from the Employment Insurance fund for training their staff, which drove volume up to a 2018 peak, then cut support for statutory and oversupplied courses and capped remote training to contain cost and quality problems, and participations halved.

Preconditions

• An employment insurance fund with a levy earmarked for vocational development
• A large market of accredited private training providers, including remote courses cheap enough to scale fast
• A ministry willing to trade headline volume for tighter subsidy rules

Where else it has been used: Levy-refund training schemes in many OECD countries show the same arc: volume grows on cheap compliance and remote courses, then falls when the funder tightens eligibility; the volume series alone cannot tell lost capability from removed waste.

The move, and what it needed

South Korea created a common regulatory-sandbox architecture with temporary permits, demonstration exemptions and rapid regulatory confirmation, then added sector-specific tracks and dedicated support bodies so smaller firms could test products without negotiating every rule from scratch.

Preconditions

• A legal framework that allows time-, place- and scale-limited exemptions while retaining safety controls
• Specialist ministries and intake bodies able to assess experiments across finance, mobility, ICT and industrial sectors
• A route from a successful test to regulatory revision, licensing or procurement rather than leaving pilots stranded

Where else it has been used: Sandbox systems travel when experimentation, safeguards and rule-change pathways are designed together; multiplying sector labels without review capacity creates a catalogue rather than a learning system.

The move, and what it needed

Three specialised organisations were combined into one agency so that internet development, security and international cooperation could be handled through a shared public capability.

Preconditions

• A government willing to merge overlapping specialist bodies
• Technical staff and institutional knowledge that can survive the merger
• A mandate broad enough to connect infrastructure, security and cooperation

The move, and what it needed

The national weather agency densified the seismic network roughly threefold and tied automatic magnitude estimates to the national cell-broadcast emergency text system, so a warning reaches every phone in the affected area without a human approval step.

Preconditions

• A national cell-broadcast channel already carried by all mobile operators
• Budget for a decade of station build-out and telemetry
• An agency trusted to issue automatic alerts that will sometimes be wrong

Where else it has been used: Japan's JMA system is the model; Taiwan, Mexico (SASMEX) and the United States (ShakeAlert) run variants. The Korean retelling stresses network density, because a small, densely populated peninsula has little lead time between fault and city.

The move, and what it needed

The government committed to a TGV-based Seoul to Busan line on a rough estimate derived from conventional rail costs, discovered within a year of breaking ground that the cost had doubled, then cut scope, created a dedicated construction authority and passed a 1996 promotion act to keep the build going until it opened in stages.

Preconditions

• A state able to keep financing a megaproject through a doubling of cost and the 1997 financial crisis
• A dedicated construction authority and imported core technology (TGV) with a transfer agreement
• A corridor dense enough that demand justified finishing the line despite the overrun

Where else it has been used: Later Korean lines (Honam, Suseo to Pyeongtaek) were built by the same authority with domestic rolling stock; the Gyeongbu record is the standard example of optimism bias in a first-of-a-kind national project.