The dissertation of Krishnamani Jayaraman reads ‘Bridging the valley of death: a socio-legal theoretical exposition’ Krishnamani has pursued his PhD thesis within the framework of the European IP Institutes Network Innovation Society consortium (EIPIN-Innovation Society)-A Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska Curie Action ITN-EJD. The ‘valley of death’ is a metaphor that refers to innovation failures. Krishnamani’s thesis studies the valley of death in social innovation contexts. The thesis visualizes the ‘valley of death’ as innovation failures that occur when public values held by stakeholders in society aren’t duly considered in social innovation decision-making processes. This conception lends credibility to recently advocated policy themes for social innovation in the European Union like ‘science with and for society’ and ‘responsible research and innovation’. In his thesis, Krishnamani pragmatically develops a legal model to demonstrate how intellectual property law exhibits complex adaptive properties that are useful to conjure stakeholder values for innovation, and in the process would be able to bridge the ‘valleys of death’ in social innovation. Krishnamani also validates this model using sociological jurisprudence in his thesis. Krishnamani’s validation applies across a variety of forms of intellectual property protection like trademarks, patents, supplementary protection certificates (SPCs), geographical indications (GIs) & protected designations of origin (PDOs) and copyrights, each which are shown to have capacities to bridge unique valleys of death in social innovation contexts. This project work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement.  As a joint doctoral scheme, this PhD is also supported by the Faculty of Law, Augsburg University, Germany.

The supervisory committee includes prof. dr. Anselm Kamperman Sanders, prof. dr. Josef Drexl, and prof. dr. Anke Moerland. Krishnamani defended his thesis on the 26th of May 2026, at the Maastricht University.

 
Krishnamani Jayaraman
Bridging the valley of death: A socio-legal theoretical exposition