December 10, 2013 at 12:30 pm ET
Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor
We are depending on new technologies to meet the challenges ahead for our planet. Facing a growing population, resource constraints, climate change and a global food system under stress, we are pinning our hopes on new technology. But we don’t do a good job of leveraging our innovation systems to impact the poor. 780 million still lack access to clean water. 1/5 of humanity lives without electricity. IPR is the fundamental driver of innovation, but donors, practitioners and policymakers are more divided than ever in their views on how IPR can be used to impact the poor. Sara Boettiger will discuss the need to re-think existing models (e.g. patent pools, clearinghouses, humanitarian use licensing), re-invent our research agenda and work to shift the international debate.
About Sara
Sara Boettiger is Senior Advisor at Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture and Assistant Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley. She is co-founder of four non-profits centered on the application of technology to meet the challenges of global poverty, including: PIPRA, Global Access in Action, GATD and AgPartnerXChange. Dr. Boettiger serves on World Economic Forum Global Agenda Councils and is active in corporate governance, currently serving on the Board of the Planetary Skin Institute. Dr. Boettiger’s work focuses on: demand-driven innovation, public-private partnerships, commercialization strategies, intellectual property rights, and new product development principles applied to technologies for the poor. She has consulted for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, World Bank, McKinsey & Company, and many others. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Agricultural and Resource Economics and publishes on the law and economics of intellectual property rights, innovation, and poverty.