Law, development and innovation. Of these three themes, it is development in which we are ultimately most interested: development is what has lifted a third of the world population out of the direst poverty over the past quarter century and holds the promise of doing the same for others still there. Law and innovation both serve this deeper purpose. How the causality amongst the three runs we do not know precisely. Law may be an enabling factor for innovation, but successful innovation may also call for legal change to facilitate future innovation. Both stimulate development, but development may in turn feedback with a lag to call forth legal adjustments and further innovation. The questions of how to stimulate development and how law contributes to this process have a long history. Once the economic take-off had occurred in Western Europe, thinkers from Hobbes and Locke, through Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Bentham, to Marx and Max Weber, to name just these, sought to understand what caused that development and what would need to be done to bring forth further growth.1 With the worldwide decolonisation after the Second World War, a new question appeared on the social science research agenda: how to stimulate economic development in the newly free countries, with the pressing request to come up with practical advice for policy makers. The advice must have been all over the map, considering the wide variety of designs that were experimented with in different parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America: from collectivisation and full-scale socialism with five-year plans through nationalisation of key industries to open market economies. Over time we have learnt that most of these experiments have turned out unsuccessful and painful to those subjected to them.