What Drives Innovation

This seminar canvasses a range of issues and views regarding how to structure innovation law and policy to spur greater technological innovation. Much debated issues in this area include whether innovation is best furthered by (1) allowing firm concentration and monopoly or rigorously applying antitrust law to promote competition, (2) robust or weak intellectual property protections, (3) robust or weak barriers to employee mobility, (4) government funding of higher education and R & D, and (5) government intervention to foster venture capital investment through tax incentives, regulation of capital markets, and direct funding. We will also engage in comparative analysis across countries at different stages of development and across industry sectors. As we shall see, one size of innovation law and policy does not necessarily fit all. We shall thus consider how innovation law and policy might best be tailored for specific contexts and conditions.

The seminar will be multiple listed as a graduate seminar in the Department of Public Policy. Accordingly, it will meet once a week for each of the ten weeks of Winter Quarter, beginning the week of January 7 and ending the week of March 11. In that regard, preference for admission to the seminar will be given to enrolled and wait listed students who attend the first class meeting. If you do not show up for the first meeting, you risk being dropped from the seminar.Students will be required to participate in seminar discussion and submit (1) one-page response papers highlighting issues and questions that arise in each of the ten sets of readings and (2) a ten to fifteen-page research paper on an aspect of innovation law and policy of the student’s choice. The ten to fifteen-page paper will not satisfy the SAW requirement. But law students who wish to satisfy the requirement may, instead, write a longer paper – at least thirty pages exclusive of footnotes. Those longer papers would be due at the end of the law school semester.