Peter W.b. Phillips

Biography

With PhD in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics, Peter Phillips has practiced for 13 years as a professional economist and senior policy advisor in Canadian industry and government. At the University of Saskatchewan he has held the Van Vliet Research Chair, created and held an NSERC-SSHRC Chair in Managing Technological Change, was a founding member and director of the virtual College of Biotechnology and was founding director of the graduate school of public policy. Phillips has had visiting appointments at the LSE, the OECD, the European University Institute, University of Edinburgh and the University of Western Australia, is associate editor of AgBioForum, a leading on-line journal, was a member of the NAFTA Chapter 13 expert panel on GM maize in Mexico and was a founding member of the Canadian Biotechnology Advisory Committee. He is vice-chair of the Board of Directors of Ag-West Bio Inc., which operates a biotech venture fund. He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Agri-food Policy Institute, the Estey Centre for the Study of Trade, Law and the Economy, and Pharmalytics, a pharmaceutical testing company. Phillips’ current research focuses on governing transformative innovation, including regulation and policy, innovation systems, intellectual property management, trade policy and decision systems. He is co-lead and principal investigator of a $5.4 million Genome Canada project entitled Value Addition through Genomics and GE3LS (VALGEN) which runs 2009-14, is co-applicant on a $725K SSHRC Insight Grant on Rethinking Intellectual Property Rights for Open Innovation and has been an applicant and investigator on more than 15 other peer reviewed grants worth more than $150 million. He has been the author or editor of 10 books—his latest, Innovation in Agri-food Research Systems: Theory and Case Studies was published by CABI in 2012—and more than 70 journal articles and book chapters.

Research Interest

Science, technology and innovation policy International political economy Regulation, governance and trade policy Decision making theory and behavioural experimentation