Making Innovation Flourish

On Evidence-Based Policymaking

We take it for granted that a solid evidence base is a key requirement for government interventions. The Department for Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform’s (BERR) five principles of good regulation state that any regulation should be “transparent, accountable, proportionate, consistent and targeted”.

Yet the European Commission – in its proposed Term Extension Directive – is calling for an extension of the European copyright term for sound recordings from 50 to 95 years, which all the independent evidence suggests would be bad news for emerging talent and for consumers.

The theoretical trade-offs are well-known: an extended term of protection, it is argued, provides incentives for musicians to create new recordings, but it also prevents artists from innovating on the back of published music and diminishes the choice of music available on the market. Which effect dominates, and the case for term extension – should rest on a careful consideration of the empirical analysis.

Happily, an international group of 50 leading academics has done just that in the Bournemouth University statement submitted last month to the European Commission.  The academics have carefully reviewed the available independent evidence and have shown overwhelmingly that the proposed term extension would be bad for Europe’s creativity (though good for a relatively small number of long-living performers and their estates).

The academics wrote to The Times earlier this week to call on policymakers to examine the case in light of the evidence.  Three cheers for the academics!

'Do we expect too little from humanity?'

That was Sir Tim Berners-Lee's response to the question 'do we expect too much from the web?'.  It was part of a memorable day for me, culminating in an event to promote NESTA's founder sponsorship of the Web Science Research Initiative, an organisation (supported by MIT and Southampton University) devoted to promoting and disseminating the emerging field of 'web science'.

I owe my career to Berners-Lee, or at least indirectly, to his invention.   It was strangely apposite that on arriving at NESTA's office, he walked past my desk while I was stuck on the phone, arguing with an ISP about a DNS issue relating to our latest collaborative workspace - the Innovation Index. 

My only other opportunity to interact with him was regarding his presentation, as I had the dubious honour of being in charge of our first live webcast from this building.  (In a 'geeks shall inherit the earth' moment I even took a picture of all the kit we'd had to hire in to do the video mixing and encoding).  I vainly tried to help his Mac talk to our plasmas, and tried not to look too panic-stricken as I realised that (a) he was presenting from his own laptop and (b) he had been updating some of the slides earlier that day - so the one I would be linking to on the live feed was marginally out of date.

The event itself was a bit of a blur.  I was operating one of the cameras, attempting to take notes and occasionally popping my head around the door to monitor the vision mixing.  All the technology worked (four overflow rooms with split screen presentations / speakers), live webcast (now archived online), twitter channels from the overflow rooms and the wider internet piling on Roland, doing a thankless task as moderator (you can see him asking questions on their behalf in the Q and A session).

Others have blogged on the content, and mused on the various offerings of both Tim, Charlie Leadbeater and Andy Duncan - the latter two having been asked to respond to elements of Tim's presentation and add some perspective from a sociological and commercial background (in the spirit of web science being a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding the web).

Ultimately, it is Tim's passion for the web, his passion for it to work better, for it to deliver meaning and value to people that will stick with me.  His humility is well documented, but I hadn't expected to him to be so passionate, so articulate and so... right.

Connecting people with information and back again.  That's all the web is.  A series of links at various levels of abstraction.  Because no matter how much or how little technology we use (irony intended), what commercial model web publishers and ISPs use, or what technical standards we use or aspire to, the web should, fundamentally, be about making positive changes - whether it's simply being more efficient or becoming better informed or breaking down geographic/age/racial barriers - in how we interact with our fellow man.