The Initiative, which is a project of the Berkeley Policy Institute, seeks to cultivate an international community of researchers committed to evidence-based “real world” approaches to assessing and developing public policies to facilitate biopharmaceutical innovation and entrepreneurship. We believe that rigorous scholarly research can play a critical role in providing regulators and legislators with a well-grounded factual basis when making complex policy tradeoffs, rather than relying on rhetoric, intuition and anecdote.