Different industries and industrial actors have different anticipatory positions towards future regulations and regulators. We theorise these positions by using the concepts of anticipatory organisations, e.g., actors engaged in future-oriented agency and actions to affect policy settings, and future-oriented regulation, e.g., anticipatory policy setting for enabling and inhibiting particular industrial practices. In the empirical part, we discuss stylised examples from the industrial domains of marine logistics and pharmaceutical manufacturing, reflecting the results of the two projects realised in the Finland Futures Research Centre, namely Gyroscope (G), Research Council of Finland (353056) and LifeFactFuture (LFF), Business Finland (6819/31/2023).

We compare the anticipatory features of organisations and regulations in these domains, for example, in the contexts of alternative fuels (G), digitalisation (G & LFF), and regulation experiments (G & LFF). Both studied domains are incumbent driven systems characterised by structures that resist too rapid or too radical system changes. For example, the effort to decarbonize the shipping sector is faced with regulation embedded in the logic of fossil economy. Combined with complex regulatory structures and lacking incentives, the resulting level of system changes in the domain is primarily incremental. Then again, pharmaceutical manufacturing is expected and required to be highly stable, with limited room for variation and experimentation.

The literature tends to emphasise the role of future-oriented regulation as a catalyst of innovation enabling environments. However, based on our empirical data, the regulative actors do not perceive their role as builders of such environments, but focus on risk mitigation and safety. Thus, an intriguing regulative continuum, or a dialectic, emerges, in which regulation can be perceived both as a “catalyst for desired change” and as a “bastion of stability”. We outline the consequences of these two positions, and discuss their repercussions for building more anticipatory industrial policies.