Conference Summary

As countries adjust to a rapidly changing geopolitical environment, leaders of middle powers are embracing national sovereignty with a twist: that to achieve sovereignty, countries must cooperate with other middle powers on technological development. Many European countries (as well as Canada) suffer from fragile innovation ecosystems in which firms find it difficult to develop and scale up technology at home, leading to innovation leakage to more power states. Reversing this trend is key to gaining sovereignty. In this presentation, Prof. Gold will discuss strategies to do so, including cooperation among researchers across middle-powers, policy experimentation, and  deploying open science to build capacity and industry support.

About Richard Gold

E. Richard Gold is a CIGI senior fellow and a James McGill Professor with McGill University’s Faculty of Law and was the founding director of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy.

He holds a B.Sc. from McGill University, an LL.B. from the University of Toronto, and an S.J.D. and LL.M. from the University of Michigan Law School.

He specializes in the legal, social, political, and economic aspects of intellectual property (IP) law and innovation. As a McGill professor, he teaches IP, international IP, and innovation policy, and, over the years, he has advised organizations like Health Canada, the WHO, and WIPO.