Open Access

By Uchenna Felicia Ugwu Achieving global food security will require innovation. Processes like plant phenotyping and technologies like digital imaging are examples of innovation that...

Published by Open AIRPublication Date: 2014Download: Optimising Benefits from Publicly Funded Research (323) This 2014 Briefing Note highlights Open AIR research findings on apparent disconnects between...

Par Abdelhamid Benhmade Sans pour autant être d’un optimisme béat ni sombrer dans un pessimisme démesuré, il est clair que la dérogation aux droits de...

By Chidi Oguamanam and Sarah O’Flaherty The State of Affairs As the vaccination rate rises in Canada and other developed nations, developing countries globally continue to record an...

By Michael Dao On March 28th, 2019, the University of Ottawa hosted the Shifting Horizons: Managing Your Research Data Conference, a day-long series of workshops for researchers. I...

Jeremy de Beer, Izabella Sowa et Kristen HolmanDate de publication: septembre 2017Télécharger: Chapitre 2: Cadres d’analyse de l’innovation africaine : l’entrepreneuriat, l’économie informelle et...

Hani Morsi, an Open AIR Post-Doctoral fellow at the Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) in Cairo, gave a seminar last week entitled “Beyond openness: Investigating the success factors of open approaches to collaboration and innovation”. This was part of the Brown Bag seminar series of AUC’s School of Business.

In the recently concluded ‘African Ministerial Conference: Intellectual Property for an Emerging Africa’ organized in part by WIPO (here), one cannot help but think that all roads leading to creativity and innovation are paved with intellectual property (IP) laws and institutions. Put differently, the level of creativity and innovation in a society is dependent solely on how we tinker with and enforce IP laws. This ‘IP parochialism’, as I call it, is manifest in the conference program. Of course, the response would be that the conference was solely about IP and as such there was no need to look beyond IP. This is an erroneous view.

To assist trade policymakers in the development of a framework, this paper explores IP issues, perspectives, and priorities related to both the CFTA and PAIPO. It suggests that process and substance issues are each important to create fair and balanced IP systems on the continent that stimulate innovation, growth, and competition.

Just last month, I had the opportunity to participate in the 13th WIPO-WTO Colloquium for Teachers of Intellectual Property held at World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and World Trade Organization (WTO) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland from 13 to 24 June, 2016. I am beyond thankful for this scholarship and enjoyed an intense two week programme, covering eighteen substantive topics touching on all areas of intellectual property (IP) law. There were thirty-nine experts from WIPO, WTO, WHO, UNFCCC, UPOV, NGOs ,and industry who took part in the Colloquium as speakers and I was among twenty-six participants selected from approximately 160 applicants from developing countries around the world.