ABOUT GAVIN CLARKSON:

Dr. Gavin Clarkson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan.  He also has simultaneous appointments at the Law School and in Native American Studies.
Dr. Clarkson holds both a bachelor's degree and an MBA from Rice University, a doctorate from the Harvard Business School in Technology and Operations Management, and is a cum laude graduate of the Harvard Law School, where he was the managing editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology and president of the Native American Law Students Association.
In July 1991, he joined the faculty of Rice University, serving as a Lecturer in Computer Science until 1998. From 1998 until 2003, Dr. Clarkson was the KPMG Fellow at the Harvard Business School. During that time he was also the John M. Olin Research Fellow in Law, Economics, and Business, the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow for Law Teaching, and held a university-wide fellowship, the 1665 Harvard University Native American Program Fellowship.  He joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 2003, where he conducts research in two distinct areas: intellectual property management and tribal economic development, including tribal access to capital markets and the determinants of success for tribal entrepreneurship.
An enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Dr. Clarkson has consulted, written, and published extensively on tribal sovereignty, tribal governance systems, tribal economic development, and tribal asset management, and has conducted extensive research on the empirical data underlying the American Indian mascot controversy. Dr. Clarkson was also a contributing author for the most recent edition Felix Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law, providing material on tribal finance, tribal corporations, economic development, and intellectual property. Dr. Clarkson holds the Series 7, Series 24, and Series 66 Securities licenses from the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD). He recently testified before the Senate Finance Committee regarding discriminatory impediments to tribal access of the capital markets, and he was recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to study tribal finance information systems.
In the non-Indian arena, Dr. Clarkson's principal research interest is intellectual property strategy. A major area of current focus involves the identification and analysis of patent thickets—dense webs of overlapping intellectual property rights that an organization must “hack” its way through in order to commercialize new technology. In industries characterized by cumulative innovations and multiple blocking patents, the existence of densely concentrated patent rights can have the perverse effect of stifling innovation rather than encouraging it. Dr. Clarkson’s research is developing fundamental insights into the interrelationships between multiple technologies, particularly in the case of patent pools (an organizational structure where multiple firms aggregate patent rights into a package for licensing), which are a potential solution to the problem of patent thickets. Dr. Clarkson was recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation for his Patent Cartography project, which is examining ways to simplify the process of searching through the patent space.
Dr. Clarkson has almost two decades of management experience, primarily in the technology industry, and has successfully launched several information technology companies including a software company, an online database firm, a special function web development company, and an internet-based education development enterprise.