It may not have been the intent of the staff from the Institute for Policy Innovation who organized the event held yesterday in recognition of World IP Day to cause me to think of the effect of a small stone tossed into a calm lake, but I did.

As I listened to an esteemed group of panelists - Lien Verbauwhede Koglin of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Michael A. Gollin of Public Interest Intellectual Property Advocates (PIIPA), and Mohit Mehrotra of Excel Life Sciences - discuss the effects of intellectual property on local social and economic development in many countries, I thought of the many ripples that one stone can cause in a lake.