Home / Union Square Ventures Sessions Events / Public Policy and Innovation
Page options

Public Policy and Innovation


Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Public Policy

Union Square Sessions - June 15, 2006, 10:00 AM - New York City


About Sessions

A couple of times a year Union Square Ventures brings together a small group for a day long conversation about ideas or events that could change the course of the information technology industry. We call these conversations Union Square Sessions.

Last fall the conversation was about peer production, the engine that drives eBay, Skype, Craigslist, Flikr, Del.icio.us, and many other innovative web services. We had a great group of participants and an energetic discussion. We tried to summarize some of the insights in a series of blog posts on our site.

Union Square Sessions, June 2006 - Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Public Policy

For the last 30 years information technology venture capitalists and the entrepreneurs they backed were largely insulated from the impact of public policy. Today, however, proposed telecommunications and consumer privacy legislation, and case law interpreting outdated intellectual property law has a big impact on the opportunity for start up companies.

Sessions June 2006 will try to address these questions:

1) Will the current direction of US public policy, including proposed legislation, recent regulatory actions, and enforcement efforts around intellectual property, consumer protection, and antitrust help or hurt innovation?

2) Are there a set of principles that should guide policy makers to maximize the probability of a balanced policy that will encourage innovation
3) Will ill advised public policy dampen innovation or just change the locus of that innovation in the way it has online gambling? In other words, is it innovation that is at risk or national competitiveness and healthy financial markets that are at risk?

Our goal with this event is bring the voice of the venture capital community into this debate at a critical moment when policy is unsettled and change is possible. The format will be a moderated discussion. There will be no speakers, or panels. Rather, we will expect the active participation of everyone who attend.

Participants

Click here to see a list of confirmed participants

Agenda

10:00 Framing the Discussion (more)

10:30 Intellectual Property – Does the current regime help or hurt innovation in the digital economy? (more)

12:30 Lunch

1:30 Legislation / Regulation – What is the potential impact of proposed telecommunications legislation and regulatory actions on entrepreneurship and venture capital? (more)

3:00 What would a balanced legal and regulatory framework look like? (more)

4:00 Adjourn

Logistics

Date - June 15th, 2006
Time - 10AM-4:00PM
Location - Wolman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, 5th Floor, New York, NY


Acknowledgements

All of us at Union Square Ventures have been thinking about the relationship between innovation and public policy for our entire careers. During that time we have worked with many bright people who have shaped our thinking – too many over too many years to recall much less mention.

We are grateful for Yochai Benkler’s introduction to The Information Society Project at the Yale Law School and its Access to Knowledge Conference. Even though the scope of this Sessions event is much narrower, we have taken advantage of a lot of the work they have done to assemble lists of resources and to identify subject matter experts.

We are also grateful to the Berkman Center for their very useful web site and their advocacy of innovation on the web.

 



     RSS of this page

    Author: Union Square Ventures   Version: 2.1   Last Edited By: andrewparker   Modified: 17 Feb 2009