Professor Gangjee delivers Keynote Address on High Risk Innovation Funding Legislation

Professor Dev Gangjee delivered the keynote address on a new legislative experiment in the UK, which establishes a funding agency supporting potentially transformative technology but with a high risk of failure (‘ARIA: Funding High Risk, High Reward Innovation’).

The keynote was delivered remotely at the IPR Nanhu Forum on April 15 in Qingdao, China. This annual event is hosted by the Center for Studies of Intellectual Property Rights at the Zhongnan University of Economics and Law.

The lecture introduced the policy underpinnings and key features of the Advanced Research and Innovation Agency Act 2022, while exploring some of the implications of IP ownership associated with any resulting new technologies that have been state funded in this manner. The legislation is based on the US Defense/Advanced Research Projects Agency model (DARPA/ARPA) which is admired in policy circles for funding ‘long shot’ innovation resulting in some notable successes. These include early iterations of today’s internet, GPS technology and autonomous vehicles.

The Forum is an influential annual event in legal and policy circles. According to the organisers, this year over 800 people attended the Forum in person and 450,000 people watched the live stream. The audience included officials from the Supreme People’s Court, China National Intellectual Property Administration, State Trademark Bureau and different appellate levels of the specialized Intellectual Property Court system, as well as academic colleagues from Chinese and overseas universities.