 All right, well, it's great to be here. I can testify to the incredibly warm hospitality from the Berkman Center that completely counteracts the freezing slush and blowing snow that one has to navigate to get here. Been a very warm welcome, thank you. I'm going to talk to you today about these meetings, technology, poverty, and law. It turns out that the intersection of these three is incredibly important right now because of the fact that we're looking to technology for almost all of the answers to the big global challenges that we face in the coming decades, particularly in the space of climate change and poverty. They all have technology components to it, and this intersection is really an important place to get some things right. The problem is that right now that field, that nexus is characterized by a sort of sclerosis. What's going on in that field is probably most evident in the intellectual property right field. If anybody who works on intellectual property right in developing countries knows what I mean by sclerosis in this field, it's a very polarized field. We're coming up to a place where we really don't have practical, innovative solutions. People have sort of dug into the trenches in positions, and they're missing huge opportunities, and they're also in some ways operating in the past. A lot of their models that they're using are based on things that under our noses in the last 10 years have changed radically. So what I'm going to do today is talk about the motivation for why we need this Global Access in Action project, which has a very practical bend. It's designed to look in the middle space there to say with a particular focus on the impact side. If we want to impact poverty with the technologies that we've got available, let's back out what that means for the law and for the legal tools and for the policy tools. So let's not start with the IP system and work downwards. Let's start with the impact that we want on the ground and try to work backwards to some practical solutions. And you'll hear a lot in the next half an hour or so, 40 minutes, about how this is different from what's going on in that field now. It's a fairly large departure. So I look forward to interruptions and challenges and questions throughout, and I'm totally happy to be derailed and go off into rabbit holes. But where I'll start is with this photograph. When I teach at UC Berkeley, I teach a really fun class on the economics and product development of technologies for the poor, and I usually start my lectures with a mystery picture because it tends to sort of pry the students away from their digital devices and focus them on the lecture. And I ask them what's going on in this photo and why is it important to the lecture? So at the risk of insulting your intelligence, what's going on in this photo? What is this woman just doing? What's she just finished doing? Voting, thank you. It turns out is a Timor-Lest elections in 2012. She has just voted. And the reason I wanted to start with this photo is because I want you to think about the word technology very broadly as we go ahead in this talk. Think about all of the ways that technology impacts developing countries. And it turns out that election monitoring and actually the implementation of elections has been really importantly changed by mobile phones, by SMS, by georeferencing technology. It started with a sort of more efficiency brought to the parallel vote counts that they were doing and the monitoring. But it's now to the point in the last few elections in Sub-Saharan Africa where we've got these really interesting systems that are actually in real time coming up with sort of these sourced information about what's going on in the countries. So that's just a good example to start with that the impacts of technology are hugely diverse and we need to think about them like that. Vaccines are often, you know, access to medicines, often where people go when they think about this intersection between poverty and technology. They think about agriculture, they think about health. And these are definitely, you know, on the table for this discussion. Diagnostics, essential medicines, all of that. But you should also be thinking about off-grid energy solutions. Huge impact in the poor populations in developing countries and emerging economies. Water. Water is going to be, as we all know, one of the really, really important factors in terms of the next couple of decades. So access to clean water, irrigation technologies. We have really important potential here. But you should also think about housing. These kids are from the slums in Calcutta. We have really incredible advances in material science. Whether we translate them and how well we translate them to change the housing conditions for the poor, I think, is an interesting subject. It turns out that just replacing the dirt floor in a poor household has a pretty big impact on the health of that household. Food. It's an area where I work a lot on. I work on every side of it, from the nutrition side, with supplements like plumpy nut. Some of you have heard this sort of miracle, nutritional supplement, through to biofortified crops, through to simply better farming practices and better technologies, better seeds, better fertilizer, better soil diagnostics. You could go on and on about how you could improve how we can deliver better and more food to the poor. And information and communication technologies. Most people now understand that mobile phones are ubiquitous in developing countries. It's not that they have reached all of the markets. We certainly have a lot more work to do in getting them into really rural markets. But they're an incredibly powerful tool when you start combining them with some of these other technologies that's going to make a big difference. But mobile phones are not the only piece in information and communication technologies. I also work on advances in remote sensing, advances in mesh networking, advances in wireless sensors. All of these technologies have really fascinating impacts on the poverty. And this is just scratching the surface. We haven't even talked about sanitation technologies or technologies that support citizen journalism or you could go on and on. So that's just to say that the word technology is very broad, and I'm hoping that with the diverse expertise in the room that you'll be thinking of a lot of these different pieces and not just focusing in on the health and the agriculture side. And it's a good thing that it's broad because we're going to need it. This figure on the right is familiar. 9 billion people on the planet by the year 2050. The estimates are that we're going to need 60% more food to feed those people and 20% more water. And that's not even mentioning the differences in the health side of things. So this is, you know, we're really running up against very difficult challenges, particularly in our global food system. And we're trying to do it in the midst of climate change. If you think about the fact that 80% of the food supply for Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa is supplied by smallholder farmers and many of those smallholder farmers farm on marginal land. They farm on rain-fed land that isn't irrigated. Climate change is going to have a really big impact as the climate gets more variable, what they plant, how they plant it, and how much they can grow. These 11 countries are considered the top 11 in the next couple of decades for disaster-induced poverty. But it's not just in agriculture. If you think about where the storms hit, the increasingly powerful storms, they hit areas where the poor are. If you think about where the sea levels are rising, those are areas where the poor are. So we tend to have a discussion about climate change in this country that's very focused on western parameters. The fact is that climate change really impacts the poor disproportionately, and it's going to make things very difficult for our jobs in the coming years. So I get very excited about new technologies with an alarming degree of regularity. I like to learn about new technologies, and I like to work on them, but I also like to have a sort of reality check on them because the fact is that despite this incredible wealth of technology that we have, we've really sort of failed to apply them to the most basic problems of poverty so far. And that's just to sort of bring into the picture here that this is not just about the innovation part. It's not just about the cool design that's made in the lab. It's about trying to figure out whether that product has value to the community where it's going. Try to engage the community into expressing whether or not that's something, instead of saying, we think you should be using this, bring it back into that loop. But it's also about commercialization. A lot of these technologies we have, and many of the technologies that you are sort of bumping around in your minds that you've seen, either as prototypes or as good examples, if you went back and checked on them, they haven't scaled. They're out there in very, very limited quantities. And I'll talk a little bit about why that is. But the best place to sort of check your hubris if you're working in international development is Sub-Saharan Africa. This is an incredible continent to be working in right now, because the innovation, the entrepreneurship that's going on here, it's drastically changed in the last 10 years. But the statistics I'm about to show you illustrate that even with the wealth of technology we have, and these are recent statistics, we've really failed to make a difference in the poverty there. 80% of the cultivated land in Sub-Saharan Africa is formed with a hand hoe. So we're talking about the technology of an oxen work. This is a good reality check for us in terms of how we're moving forward. 58% of Sub-Saharan Africans don't have access to electricity. 4% of the land is irrigated, 4% of the farmland. Even if we just solve the irrigation problem, even if we just come up and break that into some real numbers, we would make a huge difference in poverty. And 330 million that's, I think, over a third of Sub-Saharan Africans don't have access to clean water. So that's the reality check to say this is not just about innovating a really cool new technology. Getting these technologies into products and services that the poor will use, and getting them manufactured, and getting them distributed into these markets is a really big job that we have so far mostly failed. And the law and policy issues here are really at the center of these pieces. So this is a big question. How do we get global innovation and commercialization systems to deliver value to the poor? It's very centered around what the poor value and then it backs out the fact that it's both innovation and commercialization. And global access and action is about the law and policy issues that are involved in trying to figure out how to do this. So what I'm going to use the main part of this talk is to walk through three big trends that I think have really changed what's happening on the ground in innovation and commercialization. And to try to get across why the field right now is so far from providing really good practical, usable, innovative solutions. Because I'm hoping that the end of this will have a good conversation in here. Not only questions, but good ideas about where global access and action should be heading. This is a new program. It started at the World Economic Forum in their Global Agenda Councils and then comes just recently to Berkman to find a new home. So we're just in the process of designing it and it would be great to have collaborative input on trying to figure out where this should head. Any questions before I start talking about some of the big trends? Paul Pollock involved in any of this? Paul Pollock is a great mentor and friend and he certainly is very involved in the evolution of my thinking. He hasn't been involved in this particular project but Paul is the one who as I'm sure you know says if you haven't talked to 100 farmers then don't even try to think about a solution. And that's of course what part of this is about. You do need to get out there and look at the very practical side of things. What is business that has to make money? Exactly. So yes, his ideas have been very great in this. What are the major impediments that you feel that are affecting the effective delivery of such technology and commercial systems? I think that question actually is going to come out. The answer to it may come out. It's a good question but if I don't cover it then pick it back up at the end. So these are the three topics that I think have changed so much. The geography of poverty has changed. So we're no longer at a time where poor people live in poor countries by their GDP, by their national GDP. That model is what we base a lot of our legal and policy analysis on on the nation state model of looking at the poor as separated by national boundaries. So I'll talk a little bit about that. The landscape of innovation has also changed. We need to move past the idea that things are invented and the innovators are in developed countries and all of our language of technology transfer and getting things into the south. It's not that that's not a huge source of the R&D engine but we're now looking at a much more complex picture of innovation. Innovation is happening in a lot of different places and particularly for these technologies. The last one is the biggest bubble because I think it's the biggest impact. The role of companies has changed and we all know that that's been a really big shift in that many companies are working on social and environmental activities in ways that they haven't been before. So I'll talk a little bit about the drivers there and where that may afford some opportunities and some new roles for us in the public sector. The geography of poverty right now this is an institute of development studies I think out of the UK. It reckons that four fifths of the population of those who live on under $2 a day live in middle income countries which is a pretty amazing statement. If you're used to dividing the world and saying well you can have the vaccines for these markets and here's the poor countries and you leave out something like India. You're leaving out huge numbers of the poor because India is both a commercial market as well as has incredible numbers of people under the poverty line. India will be the most populous country in the world shortly. 76% of Indians currently live under $2 a day. So that's where we are right now. Lots more poverty in emerging markets, lots more poverty in countries where there are this sort of dual commercial markets as well as large numbers of poor. There are some people who believe that this is a temporary a temporary shift and that if you look ahead to say 2030 we're going to be back at the point where an estimated two thirds of the population of the poor are going to be back in fragile states. That's mostly based on whether India can grow. Which I would say no one knows the answer. So what does this mean for us in this nexus that we're looking at and this technology poverty and law it means we have to come up with some better models. We can no longer look at the divisions and the ways that we've done licensing in the past for instance. Terry and I were talking last night about intra-country differential pricing. How do we figure out things like that? Because otherwise we're not going to be able to tackle some of these big problems. I think the other thing it says about our field right now is that we have to figure out how to work with the private sector. There's a lot more opportunities if the poor are in places that have commercial markets that are functioning to be able to work in that way. So the second major trend is that the landscape of innovation is changing. There's a Boston Consulting Group study out this year that says 28% of the top multinationals revenues come from emerging markets. So that's pretty well known that everybody is entering into these markets. What I find and I work with a lot of companies is that they're not only entering into the emerging markets, they're entering into low-income markets almost everywhere that I work companies are looking at Sub-Saharan Africa as a commercial market or as a pre-commercial market. So that's one trend that's happening. A second trend is this incredible growth of emerging market multinationals. So these are homegrown in emerging market economies and it's an entirely different trend. This is not the old school multinationals that we often think of in this field but there's incredible innovation happening there. And the reason why that trend is particularly important for us is because the emerging market multinationals really understand rural markets. They know how to deliver products, they know how to design products and deliver them in markets where there are lots of poor people. So it's a really critical piece that we're not, to my mind, we're not really making use of yet. So then these are not entirely in the BRIC countries. This is Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea just as an exercise. I'm going to give you a word and you have to tell me what's the first company that comes to mind when you hear the word, okay? The word is tractor. How many of you thought John Deere? Okay, the largest tractor company in the world is Mahindra and Mahindra out of India. So just an example that in every industry there are emerging market multinationals that are not as well known to us in terms of our sort of old understanding of who's producing what. So the last trend here I think is a little bit slower trend but I think that it's going to have a big impact and that is the tools for distributed innovation and manufacturing. We've all heard about the revolution in manufacturing and whether or not that actually gets translated practically into developing countries and the technologies that I work in I think remains to be seen but they're powerful tools. If we could actually make some of these work for the kinds of innovations that we need to get out there and these go from innovations in crowdfunding so new sources of funding for these it goes through innovations in prototyping which would be amazing to have closer local manufacturing so that's a trend that I think is slower but I also think it's coming and it would be interesting and important to integrate into this. So again that question of what does it mean for our field what are the what should we be paying attention to if innovations is going to tip and is already tipping into developing market economies and into developing countries and of course there's also a tremendous amount of innovation that's very valuable that happens within developing countries and within the communities and the markets that we want to serve which just hasn't scaled there's great products out there there's great ideas there's great innovations but they don't have the resources to scale and if we can change that then an area is in finance I think we need to figure out what is the legal and policy framework behind being able to get better financing to innovators in developing countries and innovators in emerging market economies but I think another piece is intellectual property rights when you have a new innovation to come up with a strategy for how it's going to be commercialized to get out there into a product so intellectual property rights in the informal economy is something that I think we haven't paid enough attention to so we tend to spend a lot of time looking at the formal tools and trying to bring up countries into the formal system I think we haven't done enough analysis of how things actually work already people protect their intellectual assets in lots of ways that don't have to do with the formal system particularly even things like trademarks I think have not really been explored well enough in their use in developing countries they're very powerful tools much more powerful I think than we give them credit for trade secrecy contractual arrangements there's lots of things that that's the way it works there so it would be really interesting I think to understand how to move that forward the last topic this last trend is the role of companies and understanding sort of what's driving companies to to work on more social and environmental activities is a semester's worth of lectures I think or possibly a library of books but I'm going to try to hit some of the highlights here just to sort of get you thinking about what if you're studying the legal aspects policy aspects here you're trying to figure out how you can at least in my world I'm trying to figure out how I can push companies to do better in these particularly in the technology and the access to technology field and so these are the drivers if this is what's making them work in these markets it's making them produce products and deliver them I want to know how I can lower the risks for them to be there how I can make sure that they're actually delivering something that has value to the poor and how you can create some incentives for them so I think that's a sort of new field where we need to be looking it's not happening right now the public sector largely it is changing but the public sector in this interface between law and technology and poverty has been pretty resistant to trying to figure out this public-private interface so go back to socially responsible investing this dates back to I think 1921 the pioneer group was the first mutual fund that decided to screen out alcohol, tobacco and gambling investments so this is a sort of very passive strategy but it's the first one that starts to link at least in my mind it's one of the first that starts to link social environmental activities with a value to the company so we're moving from the sort of world where corporate social responsibility is a marketing tool and it's it used to be mostly in the marketing environment of companies and we're moving to a place where it's actually integrated into the corporate strategy as adding value in particular ways so socially responsible investing was one of the first pieces to move in that direction last year more than 11% of managed assets in the United States could be called socially responsible investments so the growth has been massive and then you look at things like integrated reporting this is a movement to start figuring out great, you have your sustainability goals, how do you report on them how can you actually start measuring what a company does and pulling that sustainability report in from the marketing world into the mechanics of reporting for a company most stock exchanges have ESG, environmental, social and governance reporting requirements if you float your company on that these are interesting pieces that have been used in some ways in climate change I think the Dodd-Frank bill had an extractive mining disclosures for that field but they really haven't been used to push companies towards more in the access to technology sites and we haven't seen sort of an exploration of a lot of these drivers so that's some of what's going on on the big corporate side some of that was about public companies public companies I've learned are very different to deal with than private companies which should have been really obvious to me but it took me a while to figure out that there's an entirely different set of things you can and can't do with a public company and I think that there's a lot of really interesting points of law and policy that we could be using there the second piece I'd like to talk about is that there's a lot more financing available there's new sources of financing this in particular refers to the impact investing world still very small compared to the big the total assets that are out there but it's growing and it's an important player and it's taking on really interesting new forms in private equity and venture capital it's sort of moving out from it's started in the foundations and in program related investment we need to start figuring out those new sources of financing and there's a lot going on there but yeah comparisons in how much this financial sector liberalization of a particular government's policies with respect to capital controls capital flow outflows insurance markets secondary offerings derivatives and so forth how much of that matters in terms of the innovation that delivers down to poor we certainly know it matters in terms of just the emerging market attractiveness for corporations in general but how much of that matters and which of these types of financial sector regulatory policies should we be focusing on if we're I think that's a great question we don't know that's exactly the kind of question that this nexus should be asking because this stuff is happening and we should be trying to figure out I'm not saying that somewhere out there that and I haven't and I just haven't read it but it's true that we talk about those kinds of questions for a different sector of business for a different level of business but I don't think we brought it down to who's actually reaching into these markets with technologies that make a difference yeah so the financing piece I think is and both of those topics that I just talked about are on the investor and finance and there's a whole host of other reasons why companies are moving into these markets and this comes from you know the Porter and Kramer shared value literature but but what's interesting is that these are pieces that I see every week when I'm working with companies and those are expanding their markets as the first one obviously reaching into to these new markets is is not cheap though and so trying to figure out access to supply chains there's another and secure those trying to figure out brand equity to build value in their brand because there's a lot of assumptions that these markets are going to rise in income and this is particularly true in places like rural India but also honestly to this true in sub-Saharan Africa that are a lot of places where you wouldn't expect commercial expansion and they're there because of the brand equity issues they want their brand to be the trusted one when people start coming out of poverty into having some more disposable income there's also an interesting piece at least in the agriculture sector where it's become very hard to attract and retain talent that's one of the constraints to companies right now and operating in these markets ends up actually making your company more attractive and people are happier to stay there they're happier to come work for you so that's another these are all examples of you know how these drivers are actually adding value to companies on the input supply side of course companies are trying to secure as well as diversify where their inputs come from you've heard lots about this in the news in food for instance in cocoa most of the cocoa supply for the world comes from smallholder farmers so the big cocoa companies in the world that you look at every time you eat one of those chocolate bars they have a huge interest in getting better technology to smallholder cocoa farmers so there's a lot of crossover we're no longer in this sort of world where public sector is operating kind of in parallel to the private sector and you think about the way that we've typically or often think about technologies for the poor being invented in a university lab amazing new idea it comes out and non-profit maybe forms in the university or spins out and like non-profit tries to distribute it, tries to get it out there that's no longer the model which is good because that has a really hard time scaling we now have the chance to leverage a lot of innovation and commercialization capacity if we do it right and this is where a huge number of the legal and policy issues are so there's this sort of crossover now and it is not of course as simple that they were operating in parallel before but if you look at the public sector by the public sector I mean institutions that operate in the public interest so I include universities because they have a public interest mandate I include government I include foundations, aid agencies if you include that sector there's now this sort of crossover where there's a big piece maybe a small piece but it's a piece where their goals are aligned where the technology that I want to get out the product that I want to get out to the population that I want to serve actually has a crossover with having commercial interests and what's happening is this is changing the role of the public sector so I want to close with before I do some questions to get the discussion started is just a look at how that role of the public sector has changed because it's another example of sort of how far behind this field is and this is just sort of my hypothesis for what could be happening on this public-private interface but I think it's important in part because a lot of the legal and policy tools that we talk about are the public sector responding to market failures to what we think the market has failed and therefore it's our responsibility because we have the social goals, we have the environmental goals and we need to step in and try to correct it as best we can and this is true in intellectual property rights you think about compulsory license you think about patent pools but it's true across the boards and if the role of the public sector is changing then it fundamentally changes the kinds of legal tools that we need to be thinking about and the policy interventions that we're thinking about so there's four pieces to what my admittedly really simple analysis is for possible roles for the public sector the first is to identify where the heck these overlaps are because if you're spending money working in parallel trying to do the same thing that a company could be doing you're wasting money so to try to figure out where that overlap is because that's sort of much more smart spending of resources that are limited the second piece is to push the boundaries so the company of course operates on those boundaries as to what markets they'll go into as to what products or what services they'll deliver are based on risks and returns it's a very simple calculus if you can change those risks and returns and that's a really interesting place where the legal tools come in and where the policies come in and you can draw them into markets where they wouldn't otherwise be and get them to produce products that they wouldn't otherwise be producing I think there's an interesting lots of interesting pieces there the third part is to recognize where these other sources of financing are coming from and this is impact investing crowdfunding pay for success bonds there's just a whole host of things that are out there that are not your typical financing mechanisms and the public sector I think they need a lot of help on the legal and the policy side to really understand how to make these things work and how to compliment those sources of financing and the last one is after you've looked at this picture where are the pieces that the private sector is never going to go because there's a lot of those you often hear these sort of evangelists of how the private sector is the answer to poverty in certain areas will always be populations that are not served and products that are not created by companies because it just doesn't make sense for them, doesn't make commercial sense so it will always be a role for the public sector in getting better technology to the poor but if we can target that and use our resources smartly to understand that I think that's the important piece because at the end of the day as you can tell I identify as a public sector person coming out of universities and foundations and my work isn't driven by risks and returns thankfully my work is driven by the needs of these ladies and whether or not their kids are in better health and whether they have better access to education whether they don't go to bed hungry at night those are the things that the public sector and that I care about at the end of the day so that's my summary of these three drivers and hopefully I've painted a picture for you of just how far the real world is from some of the models that we see from some of the work that's going on at this nexus of poverty, technology and law and how many opportunities there are out there to really get involved in very practical ways I'm going to put up one more slide that has some ideas for research topics and these are mostly topics that I'm already working on and it would be great to hear at some point either today in this room or email me as we start to move this project forward at Berkman, it would be really great to hear sort of your responses and what you think are priorities for this kind of targeted project that we've just talked about so starting in the upper left hand we talked about emerging market multinationals so I won't go into that again but I think there's a lot of really interesting issues given how powerful they are as players and how well they could be serving some of these markets intellectual property rights in the informal economy also something that I'd be interested in and I'm already starting some work on I think there's a lot of interesting questions there the one at the bottom right we haven't really talked about much or at all which is access to data for the poor this seems to have pretty high affinity with Berkman there's a lot of issues here so it's sort of a different lecture I think one of them that I've worked on just to give you an example is genomics data in crop sciences the future of crop sciences is of course dependent on genomics and on the bioinformatics tools to process the data and how that interaction has changed over time between the public and the private sector and who owns what and what the partnerships look like is a really important piece of the puzzle because it fundamentally determines whether we can make the advances in the crops that poor people plant or whether this becomes that just the crops that developed countries need get access to that kind of data and those kinds of bioinformatics and that sort of question is paralleled in many many types of data across the board and the last one is this idea of looking back at the mechanisms that we typically think about when we think about intellectual property rights and poverty so these are patent pools, clearing houses compulsory licensing humanitarian use reservation of rights all of these tools that we've been talking about for a long time which hopefully by now you understand that my perspective is a lot of them are actually outdated and that we need a lot of new thinking in this place but what I've started and you'll see this in the first quarter of next year is a survey of these tools which doesn't go very deep into the should side of things but it does at least catalog what these tools are, where they're being used for instance and we don't have this anywhere in terms of the models that we use to get access to technology for the poor so if you wanted to go someplace and find out what patent pools are out there, it turns out that there's only a couple for all of the time that we spend writing about patent pools the impact of them has been tiny and there's been a lot of expense spent on negotiating the licenses for them, a lot of time has taken so this is just sort of a perspective to say you know, here's the set of tools we have and here's kind of that reality check on what's out there which I think is the first step is kind of rethinking what tools we really need to be talking about so that's the end having bent your ear for almost an hour it would be great to hear not only questions but also ideas for for like marks where what are the questions that are out there that we think haven't been looked at yet yeah yeah, so so you could actually look back to before the patent system started to how inventors used to protect their intellectual property rights and that difficulty of how do you share an intangible asset without giving it away and those still exist in a lot of places in the world where we don't have the rule of law up to the standards that we do in the formal system where the formal systems work but I think a lot of it has to do with trade secrecy which we haven't really explored as a tool just understanding how things function if you're an innovator in a village or in a small city in a developing country and there's no way even if you've got a patent the institutions aren't there so it doesn't have value to you so what do you do you build contractual relationships you use trade secrecy you invest in your brand so that you become someone that associates your company or your name with that so I think those are the kinds of tools and as I mentioned before I also think trademarks within that picture are a really under explored tool yeah so the question is that they're much cheaper are there and I think we should do some work and maybe it's been done but I don't think it's out there how could we make those more accessible rather than talking about the patent system which has such a long way to be accessible by the kinds of innovations are there other tools that we could make more accessible that would be cheaper yeah I was wondering if you can elaborate and I guess my question is also how we can help so that is in process in discussion great question it's what I am in town to try to start forming the first place to help is just email me with ideas we obviously have a really broad field that we're looking at and to get anything done we're going to need to be focused but I think we really want to find what the priorities are here at Berkman and so that's the first thing and the second thing is to watch this space because in the next few months you'll definitely see a strategy for moving forward yeah hello everyone sorry for coming late so I've been here for the past half an hour listening to you I've been kind of wondering if we'll be thinking along the same line but I should start by thanking just who I don't even know who sent me an email two days ago if I wasn't interested to come here to listen to this because a year ago I had a similar dream as you were just mentioning here about IPR and innovation in Africa I'm really from Sierra Leone most of what you said is actually me as if you knew what I was thinking almost a year ago so I actually helped to run an innovation competition being run by a US based organization here called Global Minimum so I had a project in Sierra Leone and apart from doing that work I'm also a law student in Sierra Leone West Africa and whenever we go to radio stations we go to press conferences people always say you run this innovation competition for high school kids to think of ideas how they could solve their community problems but have you ever thought of how you can think of having these ideas that these kids are coming up with because these are brilliant ideas they might end up having something that could be skilled and is there any protection for these ideas so I started thinking so yes I'm a law student by then I was just in my first year in law school so I had to call the the president of my board who happens also to be at the MIT and he is to Israel Union how can we help with such a thing right so I thought secondly that maybe because I'm a law student we don't have the legal framework in Sierra Leone to help these kids because I had to do research right so because of the numerous calls and complaints that we receive how can you protect the ideas of these kids after when they come up with this thing if they are scalable how can we protect them so I had to do some research when I did this research I found out that we don't have the legal framework they could encourage even if we work with this thing for years or 10 years into the competition there is no legal policy or framework that these kids or our competition could rely on to encourage more innovations and stuff like that so I talked to my president the president of the board and he had to link me with somebody who I've actually not met again but we had to have conversations right on email and who said they would help me to have like a guided research on IPR intellectual property right which was like something I'd always wanted so I had this like a framework I reached such objective which is just in line so when I've been here for the past half an hour listening to you it's like just in line email me to something that I can just share all of you may be on email so that you can see the idea the idea that I've been thinking of two years ago is just what you guys are just putting on the table now send it to me and I'll send it out to people who are interested something that I'm just so interested in great I'm so happy to be here today sorry you were next the emphasis the role of companies part your emphasis on socially responsible there are enough adaptations of existing technology and that sort of specific tools that the gap is really in funding I'm curious, I don't think that's what you mean so but impact investing I think maybe a lot of those investors would say the opportunity set that they're looking at is pretty limited so then that becomes circular how do you think about that and what are some sort of particular examples of adaptations that you like yeah so I mean it's a good because I wasn't suggesting that and I was more introducing it as one of the places where I think we haven't really used yet in the technology for poverty space that has been used more in the environmental and sustainability space that I think it would be interesting to explore what kinds of incentives does that need to happen if you're going to do this and not so much I think the venture capital where it's focused on for instance ICT I think that is happening in some ways but there's a different calculus of risk for financing companies that are technology that are going to produce technology for these markets so what does that mean for us looking at the environmental impacts which is often where we've seen it so I don't know what the answer is to your question but I mostly wanted to highlight it because I think it is it's one of the levers which we're not using right now even at the level of stock exchanges and reporting requirements straight down into impact investors and what do they need so I don't know what the answer is yet but I think it's a field that we just haven't especially when I talk to donors I think that because I talk about the technology side of things I find that they really don't they understand of course the innovative financial mechanisms side of things but not so much where it's trying to fund this kind of stuff so once I further identify a few of the types of new technologies that these new financial mechanisms could be applied to like your irrigation example or the pest control examples some of these that you mentioned have not scaled up but if advanced could be beneficial that would be helpful so Terry is referring to the Sproxel model which maybe some of you are familiar with this was developed to look at the counterfeit drug problem primarily in developing countries and it's basically on the packaging of pharmaceuticals there's a scratch card that's embedded in the packaging you then use your mobile phone to text in the number and it kicks back and answers to whether or not it's counterfeit so this particular piece was of such interest to the major pharmaceuticals because they do have a lot of counterfeit products that didn't have the financing problem or at least to my knowledge that it was a fairly easy one to launch and of course doesn't take a lot there's really interesting applications however in taking that out of the pharmaceutical and it's been used in many different areas it's been used to test whether electrical wire is counterfeit or not it's been used to test whether crop chemicals for crop protection are counterfeit or not so it's now that everyone has a mobile phone it's an interesting model I'm working on it to try to verify the adoption of a technology so right now we don't even know when a product gets to a low income household if you ask a donor yes you've funded this incredible amount of research into this new variety of seed they can't tell you how many people are growing that crop of how many poor people are growing it in their fields I think there's a lot of possibilities on this particular model but I think coming up with a sort of set of technologies that meet some of the requirements for scale some of them don't some of the technologies we look at in the US that look really cool and are sort of touted as having a big impact on poverty is unlikely to scale but I think we could do that and I think there are forums where connecting the investors to those but more importantly there's probably legal vehicles and legal questions in that investment space that would help to try to start negotiating those deals to try to understand where we're running up against particular types of risk are we running up against why aren't they investing in that is it just because they don't know the opportunities are out there or is it because of other reasons yeah I would like to share two points here identifying the local technology as you have stated there are some experiments going on in India I hope you must be knowing about Anil Gupta so in Indian Institute of Management we've been doing wonderful work on identifying local innovations and protecting them making it sustainable for the people and work for the poor there are two initiatives he has come out with one is the Honey Bee Network the other one is Shristi so the major work of this is that village to village they go and identify who are innovative and what are the technologies they operate with and they are trying to model it and sell it to people and also protect it by way of a simple registration type of thing and they're trying to protect it through policy initiatives but that is not happening so far but at the local level they're trying to protect the innovators and to replicate to the various other communities this is one thing happening thousands of innovations it's not one or two it's a big catalog available maybe I can share that information to you and others also the second thing is that when you were talking the leveraging the IP instruments work for the poor I think many people are thinking and writing for example, patents how it can work for and copyrights there are many initiatives like the open access and categorizing the IP that will work for poor creative commons initiatives because you yourself as an author you can open up that you can leave certain part of your copyright that can be free that can be shared that can be replicated I mean copied or modified whatever versions different versions instead of being too rigid one example is in this that the policy is being questioned here in India if anyone knows about the Delhi University copyrights case so now it is going on you know as you said that 76% of the people in India live less than two dollars and it is this huge population they need education and India is known for education they have a strong desire to go to universities and learn the higher education when they come to these universities they find it very difficult to get the books and resources how can you imagine that these people and for example I am coming from Delhi University 80% of people I know that they don't have any resource to buy the books and I in my whole life I studied based on the library books here it is the library books and most of the people they study by taking photocopies and the universities themselves they allow certain small photocopy operators to set up their own units within the university so that at the very cheap only the operating cost they will charge and they will make the photocopies and give it to the people and the students and these have been questioned by all the Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press every university press stating that the university is conniving with the people, the photocopies and they are infringing the copyright this is going on and none other than Gopal, Gopal's surname is the lawyer who is fighting the case now yesterday was the argument which is going on in Delhi High Court so this is being questioned, so this is coming out like right to education versus IP after all the IP it is to promote the knowledge of the society as well as in the by back you also protect the rights but it should be it should be flexible and it should, the larger interest should not kill the the lesser interest should not kill the larger interest, isn't it this is what is being questioned, I think this is happening and this kind of a discussions should happen the same thing should happen in patents and trademarks I think all the instruments that we have so far developed and which are being operated now they were designed for different time, different age different situations but now we are in a different life I think now we need to rethink about it absolutely, I think in some ways that I understand your framing of the argument, another framing of it is a market segmentation that market segmentation that Terry and I were talking about in differential pricing for drugs actually has much more broad applications across a lot of different technologies so first off I work with a group convened under the International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development that is working in conjunction with the WTO to think about how we should be changing trade rules to better foster both sustainable development and trade and it is really assuring to hear you reach some of the same conclusions we haven't publicly stated but we have been discussing internally which is part of the problem is financing and there is a much bigger role being played by trade secrets that has been emphasized so we should definitely stay in touch with all of this. There is two points and comments that I wanted to make both in response to the conversation but also to an issue that we have been grappling with that I wanted to get your input on. One is this issue of access and where some of the problems are and so forth. Part of what we have been finding is that a lot of this comes down to distribution networks and that where the web and technologies and mobile technologies allow for circumventions of market failures along the distribution networks technology has been playing great gains but where you still rely upon physical goods to deliver those distribution networks these are often times public sector failures in terms of providing for those distribution networks as well as providing for in some states failed state security along those networks that the private sector is not going to choose to enter until those types of public sector failures get cured and some of these are issues of scale particularly within Sub-Saharan Africa in terms of innovation where we have been looking at, even if you look at the markets and growth that is coming out for the South from the poor, they have been largely coming out from large scale markets like India particularly but also China, Bangladesh and others to some extent that you just don't see the scale here within Africa to be able to deal with and so this partially comes down to the political configuration of Africa which we have no abilities to redress. I just wanted to point out, I think that's where we are seeing some of these issues and difficulties come into play. The other thing that I wanted to point out is a comment. Can I just make one comment? Just articulating that though changes the dialogue. It clarifies things trying to sort of map out all of the different pieces and some of them you just brought to the table I think shifts the dialogue away from a sort of black and white access issue into the reality which is really complex and changes technology by technology and country by country so I think it's valuable even if it's not something that we can necessarily do something about without a very long national policy process I still think there's value and sometimes we think about these as capability issues but really they're historical remnants of colonialism that are affecting certain market dynamics today and that's not something we have the it's within the bandwidth tools we can have so the second thing that I wanted to observe was that when it comes to technology solutions for the poor we're finding actually that there's a lot of funding but potentially more room for funding when you're talking about being able to provide a differentiated product that the quote unquote I mean I don't know how many of you here saw Elysium but those who live in the first world Elysium elites we have no desire for so for example I think a great success has been talking about solar solar power basic stoves that don't require you know they're using solar powering for stoves that for poor markets which aren't necessarily on the grid today but don't require this gathering of firewood which saves actually it's really gender positive because it saves women from having spent so many hours in the field to gather firewood and so forth right but that's something that none of us here in the first world ever seeks to purchase right this is primarily a southern solution for southern problems right and so this leads me to I think the observation or the conundrum the problem that we've been facing is if I can borrow a marker for a second is in certain goods like when you talk about textbooks or drugs or even say seeds right essentially from a more point of view we aren't saying the south should get an inferior product to the north right and then when you look at the cost curves for those or the demand curves right they look primarily like that sometimes with greater shifts out and so forth but where for the private sector actor the most efficient point to price is up here for this because this is where you reap the greatest amount of profits right and so for us I think what's been most difficult for us to grapple with is how to think about what's the right way to be thinking about IP models to address these types of cost curves because the types of IP solutions that are being proposed in academia patent pools creative comments and so on and so forth they don't work in this type of market because the private sector firm has an option of exit right and particularly within while we have differentiated jurisdictions of markets right so as long as they have the option of exit whatever types of creative solutions we come up with for that doesn't seem to work and one thing that we have seen work in parts of the developing world is if you're able to shift this cost curve through growth right as we've seen in China or as we've seen in India actually the pricing drops right because the efficient pricing these are rational actors the efficient pricing from where they can reap most profits would be to drop this such that access increases but it requires a shifting of the cost curve here right and that's for us has seemed that that's why we tie the trade innovation piece of it because trade is the part that's actually more responsible for shifting this curve than the IP part of it but the question that we've been grappling with is if we're not able to shift this curve because of public sector failures in many of these states right is there an IP solution around this given that what we thought about today hasn't seem to work so that's what we're grappling with I don't know if you have any additional thoughts or of the processing since so forth right compulsory licensing patent pools right on price funds and so forth whether anything right seems to work better or worse our sense is price funds in the like work very well when we're talking about southern solutions to southern problems right but when we're talking about non differentiated good or about I mean morally whether or not we want to introduce a differentiated product when there's truly leakages here right that can be had how we grapple with those types of problems but I just wanted to share that's a little bit some of where I think intellectually we're really grappling and searching for solutions I'd love to hear any additional thoughts that you have the answer is a fantastic question and it's exactly you know where this project is that that problem is exactly and there's of course five different sides to that problem that would require walking through so the answer is we should connect okay thank you very much thank you