Public actor roles in market experiments: Innovating digital health markets in New York and Ireland

This paper responds to calls for greater focus on public actors in market innovation, asking how public actors engage in market experiments to innovate public goods markets. We introduce the concept of market experiments, and particularly public actors’ roles in instigating and directing such experiments, to better understand how market innovation processes are put into motion to effect market change and solve specific problems. We focus on two market experiments that track government efforts to encourage the inclusion of digital health technologies in healthcare markets in Ireland and the U.S. between 2015 and 2017. In doing so we move beyond views of government as largely confined to a regulatory role in institutional change. Rather, we see government actively experimenting for possible future markets that can embrace rapid digitalization and meet societal needs. We outline four different government roles across different stages of market de-institutionalization and re-institutionalization: triggering, stabilizing, and prescribing market experiments and anointing market actors.