A much debated question: the relationship between regulation and innovation. The case of novel food

Abstract of the seminar

The impact of legal rules on scientific and technological innovation represents a conundrum difficult to disentangle. Do legal rule promote innovation, providing incentives to develop new products and processes and protecting the investments made by economic players to create them? Or, in the opposite, does regulation stifle innovation, creating obstacles slowing down or even blocking the development of new products and processes? A further question relates to capability of regulation to keep the pace of innovation: it is rather frequent to see cases where innovation is much faster than lawmakers, giving rise to situations of uncertainty as to the legal status of the new products/processes created. Exploring the dynamics between regulation and innovation requires both to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue between lawyers and innovators and to narrow down the analysis to specific instances where innovation and regulation meet. For these reasons, the seminar will focus on the case of novel food, since this represents an area where innovation is at the forefront and a specific regulatory framework is in place.

The speakers.

Prof. Paolo Borghi is full professor of Food Law and of EU Agricultural Law at the University of Ferrara. He’s a lawyer, specialized in food law. He is a co-founder of AIDA-IFLA (Italian Food Law Association) and a member of the Board of the CSDA (Scientific Community of Agricultural Law). He’s co-director of two food law journals and co-editor of a food law scientific treatise, author of hundreds of law essays.

Prof. Eugenio Aprea is associate professor of Food Chemistry at Center Agriculture Food Environment and Department of Cellular, Computational and Integrative Biology at University of Trento. He is co-authors of more than 200 papers (120 of them reported in SCOPUS, HI=38) mainly in the fields of Food Science and Technology, Sensory analysis and analytical chemistry.