Intellectual Property Rights in Frontier Industries
April 30, 2004

Dan Burk is an internationally prominent authority on intellectual property law, specializing in cyberlaw and biotechnology. Professor Burk joined the University of Minnesota Law School faculty in the Fall of 2000 as Professor of Law and Vance K. Opperman Research Scholar.  He holds appointments at both the Law School and the Center for Bioethics, and was appointed to the Julius Davis Chair in Law during 2001-2002.  He teaches courses in Copyright, Patent, and Biotechnology Law, and is the author of numerous papers on the legal and societal impact of new technologies, including articles on scientific misconduct, on the regulation of biotechnology, and on the intellectual property implications of global computer networks. Professor Burk is a member of the Order of the Coif and has served as a legal advisor to a variety of private, governmental, and intergovernmental organizations, including the American Committee for Interoperable Systems, the OECD Committee on Consumer Protection, and the United States State Department Working Group on Intellectual Property, Interoperability, and Standards.

Iain Cockburn is Professor of Finance and Economics in the School of Management at Boston University, where he teaches and researches business strategy, intellectual property, economics of innovation, and management of high technology companies. Prior to coming to BU, he was the VanDusen Professor of Business Administration in the Faculty of Commerce at the University of British Columbia, where he was the winner of the “1997 MBA Teacher of the Year” Award.  He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a former Associate Editor of Management Science and is currently a Coeditor of the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy. Professor Cockburn has published widely in leading journals in economics and management.  Among his most widely cited papers are “Measuring Competence: Exploring Firm Effects in Pharmaceutical Research” in Strategic Management Journal, “Generics and New Goods in Pharmaceutical Price Indexes” in American Economic Review, “Racing to Invest? The Dynamics of Competition in Ethical Drug Discovery” in the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, and “Absorptive Capacity, Coauthoring Behavior, and the Organization of Research in Drug Discovery” in the Journal of Industrial Economics.
 

Wesley Cohen joined the faculty of the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University as Professor of Economics and Management in September 2002. His teaching career includes twenty years at Carnegie Mellon University and courses covering economics of technological change, industrial organization economics, the economics of entrepreneurship, policy analysis, organizational behavior, corporate strategy and the 
management of intellectual capital. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.  Cohen's research has focused on the economics of technological change and R&D.  He has examined the links between firm size, market structure and innovation, firm learning, the determinants of innovative activity across industries and firms, the knowledge flows affecting innovation, the means that firms use to protect their intellectual property (especially patents) and the links between university research and industrial R&D.  He has published in numerous scholarly journals and co-edited the recently published volume, Patents in the Knowledge-Based Economy.  He served for five years as a Main Editor for Research Policy and served on the National Academies’ Committee on Intellectual Property Rights in the Knowledge-Based Economy, and currently serves on the National Academies' Panel on Research and Development Statistics at the National Science Foundation.

Stuart Graham is assistant Professor of Strategic Management for the College of Management at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he teaches courses in law and international management. He is also an attorney licensed to practice in New York State and a member of the American Bar Association. Professor Graham has written on intellectual property and litigation strategies in the software and biotechnology industries, comparative studies of the U.S. and European patent systems, and the use by companies of patenting and secrecy in their innovation strategies.  Some of his recent publications include “Prospects for Improving U.S. Patent Quality via Post-grant Opposition” in National Bureau for Economic Research, Innovation Policy and the Economy IV (with B.H. Hall, D. Harhoff, and D.C. Mowery), “Submarines in Software? Continuations in U.S. Software Patenting in the 1980s and 1990s” in Economics of Innovation and New Technology (with D.C. Mowery), and “Intellectual Property Protection in the U.S. Software Industry” in National Research Council, Patents in the Knowledge-Based Economy (with D.C. Mowery).

Robert Hahn is cofounder and executive director of the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies. Previously, he worked for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Harvard, and Carnegie Mellon University. Mr. Hahn frequently contributes to general-interest periodicals and leading scholarly journals, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, American Economic Review, Science and the Yale Law Journal. Most recently, he is the author of Reviving Regulatory Reform: A Global Perspective and editor of Government Policy toward Open Source Software.  In addition, Mr. Hahn is cofounder of the Community Preparatory School––an inner-city middle school in Providence, Rhode Island, that provides opportunities for disadvantaged youth to achieve their full potential.

Starling David Hunter joined the faculty of the MIT Sloan School of Management as an assistant professor in 2000. His research interests include the strategic uses and organizational consequences of information technology. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Management from the Fuqua School of Business in 1999. He also obtained an MBA from the Fuqua School in 1992 and a BS in Electrical Engineering in 1985 from Arizona State University. Outside of academia, Professor Hunter has worked as an engineer in the 
Electromagnetic Technology Group of the Boeing Defense and Space Group and as a Human Resource Analyst at Exxon Chemical's Bayway Refinery in Linden, NJ.

David Mowery is Milton W. Terrill Professor of Business at the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Mowery is spending the 2003-2004 academic year as the Marvin Bower Fellow at the Harvard Business School. Professor Mowery has also taught at Carnegie-Mellon University, served as the Study Director for the Panel on Technology and Employment of the National Academy of Sciences, and served in the Office of the United States Trade Representative as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. His research deals with the economics of technological innovation and with the effects of public policies on innovation. In addition to serving on a number of National Research Council panels, he has testified before Congressional committees and served as an adviser for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Professor Mowery has published numerous academic papers and has written or edited a number of books, including recent contributions: Paths of Innovation: Technological Change in 20th-Century America; U.S. Industry in 2000; and The Sources of Industrial Leadership. His academic awards include the Raymond Vernon Prize from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, the Economic History Association's Fritz Redlich Prize, the Business History Review's Newcomen Prize, and the Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award.

Arti Rai is Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law. Her teaching and research interests include intellectual property (with a focus on patent law), law and the biopharmaceutical industry, and health care regulation. Her most recent publications include “Engaging Facts and Policy: A Multi-Institutional Approach to Patent System Reform,” in Columbia Law Review; “Gene Patenting: A Case Study in Patenting Research Tools,” in Academic Medicine; and Law and the Mental Health System, 4th edition (with Ralph Reisner and Chris Slobogin). Prior to joining the Duke Law faculty in 2003, Professor Rai was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she was also a visiting professor in Fall 2000. She is on the Board of Editors of the American Journal of Law and Medicine, the advisory board for Public Knowledge, Inc., and has served as a consultant to the National Human Genome Research Institute’s ELSI program and to the National Academy of Sciences.

Scott Wallsten is a fellow at the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.  Before joining the Joint Center, he had been an economist at The World Bank, a scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a staff economist at the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers.  His interests include industrial organization and public policy, and his research has focused on regulation, privatization, competition, and science and technology policy.  His work has been published in journals including the RAND Journal of Economics, the Journal of Industrial Economics, the Journal of Regulatory Economics, Regulation, and Nature Magazine, as well as the Washington Post, The Financial Times, and newspapers throughout the world.