The first CREATe Public Lecture this semester will be given by Professor Dev Gangjee, from the University of Oxford, who will present on the topic of the UK’s new Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) – its goals, structure, vision and its place in the wider Intellectual Property landscape.
Our lecture will take place on Wednesday 31 January, at 5.30pm in the Humanity Lecture Theatre and will be in an in-person-only format. CREATe’s Dr Luis H Porangaba (Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law, Glasgow School of Law) will chair the event. After our guest’s presentation, there will be time for Q&A with the audience, as well as a drinks reception afterwards.
To register your attendance, please visit our BOOKITBEE PAGES.
ARIA’s IP-shaped Hole
The UK’s new Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) embodies a new approach to funding emerging fields of research and technology. It was conceived to support visionary high-risk, high-reward scientific ideas and technological applications, leading to transformative change. ARIA has been explicitly modelled on the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whose notable successes include pioneering research into the internet, autonomous cars and the mRNA technology used in Covid vaccines.
Key features of this new body are its mission-oriented approach to ambitious challenges; its reliance on expert programme directors, with considerable autonomy to facilitate research; and its lean structure, with limited bureaucracy. However, one notable absence is an intellectual property policy relating to the research that ARIA funds. This presentation situates ARIA – and other DARPA clones or cousins – against the broader backdrop of other state-funded innovation models, which take diverging approaches to the question of intellectual property ownership or access arising from such research. Vaccine development during the pandemic has renewed an interest in how the taxpayer will benefit from such publicly funded research initiatives.
Dev Gangjee is Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the Oxford Law Faculty. Dev’s research focuses on Intellectual Property (IP), with a special emphasis on Branding and Trade Marks, Geographical Indications and Copyright law. Thematic research interests include the history and political economy of IP; collective innovation; the significance of registration for intangibles; and rights in data. He has acted in an advisory capacity for national governments, law firms, international organisations and the European Commission on IP issues.