Biography:

Professor Richard Jefferson is a prominent molecular biologist, agricultural scientist and innovation systems strategist, and the leading exponent of ‘Innovation Cartography’. He is the founder and CEO of Cambia, a Professor of Science, Technology and Law at the Queensland University of Technology and Rogue at National ICT Australia, where he is the Director of The Lens.
Professor Jefferson is a graduate of the University of California’s College of Creative Studies, with a PhD in Molecular Biology from University of Colorado. As a National Institutes of Health postdoc in Cambridge, he conducted the world’s first field release of a biotech crop and created the most widely cited and licensed enabling biotechnology distributed under open source  principles.

After becoming the first Molecular Biologist for the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation, he founded Cambia in 1991, an independent, global non-profit social enterprise to bring efficiency, effectiveness and equity to science-enabled
innovation. Cambia created the BiOS Initiative, the first open patent-based commons for science, and the Patent Lens, a leading global resource for patent transparency. This work has culminated in the current vision of a global digital public good — ‘The Lens’ — to disrupt and democratise the innovation system.

Profiled in diverse media ranging from The Economist, Newsweek, Nature, New York Times to Red Herring, he has been named to the Scientific American List of the World’s 50 most influential technologists. Professor Jefferson is an Outstanding Social Entrepreneur of the Schwab Foundation, a frequent Davos panellist and was a long-serving member of the Global Agenda Council on Intellectual Property of the World Economic Forum.

Presentations:

• Open or perish: long live the new king