Open Access

By Helen Chuma-Okoro and Nicole Tumaine This is part two of Helen Chuma-Okoro and Nicole Tumaine’s blog post on the insights retained from 2018 conferences,...

By Helen Chuma-Okoro and Nicole Tumaine Access to knowledge (A2K) is necessary to further innovation and creativity. Due to the exclusive nature of...

By Meghan Blom Open AIR aims to understand how open collaborative innovation can help businesses scale up and seize the opportunities of the global knowledge economy....

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...

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...

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...

Par Ahou Rachel KOUMI Ce blogpost est la deuxième partie d’une série de deux blogs sur les Journées de l’Innovation en Contexte Académique réalisées du 19...

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.

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.