News

takes place 11-14 November on ZOOM https://yale.zoom.us/j/3713192937

It features a session with the winners of the Eighth Annual Amartya Sen Essay Prize Competition.

Apart from this, much of this year’s event is devoted to exploring incentives and rewards for creating and delivering innovations. Globalized in 1995 through the TRIPs Agreement, humanity’s dominant mechanism for encouraging innovations involves 20-year product patents, whose monopoly features enable innovators to reap markups or licensing fees from early users. This mechanism leads innovators to ignore the needs specific to poor people, who cannot afford to pay large markups; and it also tends to exclude the poor from marketed innovations that are still under patent. In addition, monopoly patents are insufficiently sensitive to externalities — they under-reward, for example, benefits enjoyed by parties other than an innovation’s buyers and users, resulting in massive underinvestment in R&D of green technologies.

Arguably, these problems can be much alleviated by adding a second reward option. This might be a class of domain-specific supplementary alternative mechanisms featuring fixed annual reward pools to be divided among participating innovations according to the social impact achieved with each. Innovations registered for such impact rewards would have to be sold at or below variable cost. An international Health Impact Fund in the pharmaceutical sector, for instance, would create powerful new incentives to develop remedies against diseases concentrated among the poor, rapidly to provide such remedies with ample care at very low prices, and to deploy them strategically to contain, suppress, and ideally to eradicate the target disease. Analogously, a Green Impact Fund for Technology would create powerful new incentives to develop, and to supply at highly competitive prices, new technologies that avert and reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. By promoting innovations and their diffusion together, impact funds might greatly enlarge the benefits of innovation, especially to the poor, and thereby also its cost-effectiveness.

Brief Program:

11/11 at   9:45-10:00     Introduction to the Conference

11/11 at 10:00-11:00     Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia U Center for Sustainable Development)

11/11 at 11:11-12:50     Panel on human rights and intellectual property rights, Diane Desierto (Notre Dame) with Jorge Contreras (U of Utah College of Law), Lawrence Gostin (Georgetown U Law Center) and Ruth Okediji (Harvard Law School).

11/12 at   9:45-10:50    Awarding of the Amartya Sen Essay Prizes, Tom Cardamone (Global Financial Integrity) with Chia-Yun Po (First Prize; “Myanmar’s Jade: The Intersection of Illicit Financial Flows and Armed Conflicts”), Christopher Ngosa (joint Second Prize; “The gendered impacts of illicit financial flows in developing countries”) and Oluebube Offor (joint Second Prize; “Tales of Terrorism Financing in Nigeria: A Panoramic Account of its Root Causes, Consequential Impacts and Possible Reforms”).

11/12 at 11:00-12:30    Panel on the economics of innovation incentives, Aidan Hollis (U of Calgary) with Panos Kanavos (London School of Economics), Margaret Kyle (MINES ParisTech Center for Industrial Economics) and David Popp (Syracuse U).

11/13 at   9:00-10:50   Panel on Indian perspectives on innovation incentives, Sachin Chaturvedi (RIS) with Bhaskar Balakrishnan (RIS), Chandra Bhushan (iFOREST), Sudip Chauduri (CDS), Ashok Madan (IDMA), Leena Menghaney (MSF-India), Yogesh Pai (NLUD-Delhi), R.R. Rashmi (TERI).

11/13 at 11:00-12:50     Panel on African perspectives on green innovation, Bryan P. Galligan (Jesuit Justice and Ecology Network Africa) with Eugene Kabilika (Caritas Zambia), Dennis Kyalo (JENA & Aspen Institute), Emmanuel Nyadzi (Wageningen U) and Ifesinachi Okafor-Yarwood (U of Saint Andrews).

11/14 at 10:00-11:20    

11/14 at 11:30-13:00     Panel on business and finance perspectives on pharmaceutical innovation, Jami Taylor (Protagonist Therapeutics) with Geoff Davis (Sorenson Impact), Nadza Durakovic (Blue Mark), Alice Lin Fabiano (Johnson & Johnson), Aina Fadina (Atento Capital), Gabrielle Gay (Kensington-SV Global), Pradeep Kakkatil (UN Health Innovation Exchange), Joanne Manrique (Center for Global Health and Development), Oliver Niedermaier (Tau Asset Management), Gerhard Pries (Sarona Asset Management) and Chuck Slaughter (TPG Rise).

11/14 at 13:30-14:00     Wrap-up.