There are many examples of successful companies that fall into that category.

Sometimes an innovation needs critical mass to work - social networks for example. LinkedIn famously got big by being extremely aggressive on how they mined your contacts. You'd get sued to the moon and back in the EU for this behaviour.

LinkedIn is big now, it has established itself and no longer needs to be that aggressive. Any European player that tried to enter the market with a less aggressive stance had no chance - they never reached that critical mass.

And we are all so grateful that LinkedIn's aggressive innovation was allowed to flourish.

Bayer would have never invented heroin, if there had not been a market for that and there is a market for that because its a great product. The greatest actually, surpassing all other products, including human society and its the purest form of capitalism. All other products and businesses are just pre-cursors for this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin#History

No. Regulations are required so companies produce value rather than exploits. There's no stopping the exploits, especially in an environment where $$$ === speech, but regulation is required for companies to produce value for customers.

A good example is the US "health care" system. It's a meat grinder that exploits everyone and sort of pretends to do what it's supposed to through regulation.

Since the people making the innovations and regulations are different, I fear there’s no way to implement regulation that doesn’t lead to suboptimal results.

And to be clear, when I say suboptimal results I mean misery and death in large quantities.

Yes, but the innovators' incentives don't always align with the needs of the people the regulations should protect.

Regulation are a necessary balance, otherwise the innovators become so powerful they eventually concentrate all the power and privilege and make weaker people pay for it.

Chlorofluorocarbons were an innovation for some times, then we needed regulation to save our ozone layer. Industrial wouldn't have stopped using it.

It's a fine line, constantly moving, an nobody will never be perfectly happy about it.