A bold geothermal energy project in Switzerland gives an excellent example of why you should send your lawyers on vacation from time to time.

To all lawyers out there, please don’t take this personally. Although I am a fierce enemy of administrative hurdles, this article is not about questioning the necessity of your profession.

Whilst laws, lawyers, and justice are essential to govern most aspects of modern life, what about new technologies and radical innovation?

What does regulation do to an emerging technology? It might kill it before its true potential is known, thereby preventing progress. On the other hand, an emerging technology that gets out of hand unregulated might also create huge problems down the road. Think about nuclear power, where it is certainly a good thing to have some tough regulations in place.

Let’s use the example of a large-scale geothermal energy project in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Back in 2005, this city of 80,000 people spent 150M CHF (150M USD) per annum on fossil energy. To reduce their dependency on fossil energy, the city council analyzed many different options to redesign the energy supply system. In an audacious move, they decided to test unchartered waters and invest 150M CHF into a large-scale geothermal plant. An investment of 150M CHF should generate renewable heat and electricity for the coming 50 years, at the one-off price of the annual fossil energy bill.

In Switzerland, we cherish direct democracy, and the plan was put to a referendum with the local population. 83% of the population voted in favor of the project, even though the outcome of the project was completely unknown. Nobody had ever drilled a hole of 4,500m below the city before.

The project took its course, from feasibility studies to geological surveys to drilling that hole. It was realized in a record time of 7 years because there existed no regulation that could have delayed the project.

And then it happened. In 2013, natural gas entered the drilling hole, leading to a series of events that ended in an earthquake of magnitude 3.5 on the Richter scale. To make things worse, the actual output of hot water was significantly lower than projected, reducing the available thermal power by roughly 80% against the initial plan. Increasing the hot water output would have further increased the seismic risks. Not increasing the hot water output would have crashed the economic perspective of the project. So it was decided to stop the project, even though lots of money was already spent.

Nevertheless, both the population and the team still said the project was a success.

Asking the responsible persons if they would proceed in the same way again with the next geothermal project, the clear answer was yes. Of course, abandoning the project sent shockwaves through the geothermal industry, but nobody could have foreseen the difficulties the project team met. And at the end of the day, the bad luck was also good, since the earthquake didn’t create significant harm to the infrastructure and the population in the region.

Because there was no regulation, the project could proceed and fail fast.

Because there was no regulation, there wasn’t any litigation in the aftermath of the project.

Regulation often chokes a healthy error culture, without which no major innovation is possible. Every entrepreneur’s journey starts with unregulated trial & error — no matter if you’re building a simple mobile app or a geothermal power station. Every entrepreneur starts from nothing. Every entrepreneur walks out into the void without knowing where the journey will end.

Do you know why a bumble bee flies? Physically, a bumble bee can’t fly, it’s too heavy. But the bumble bee doesn’t know physics. It’s the same with radical innovation and regulation: Innovations should fly even if regulation says they shouldn’t.

Again, I am not advocating an anarchic, unregulated society at all. I’m glad to live in a civilized nation and not in a failed state. But maybe we have gone a little too far in choking innovation with legal paperwork before we know if it could help us solve our major problems.

And with all those major problems threatening just about every aspect of our lives, let’s have regulation follow innovation, rather than the other way around.