Research

By Bertha Vallejo and Erika Kraemer-Mbula Dr. Bertha Vallejo is an OpenAIR QES fellow with the University of Johannesburg. She analyzes the adoption of Industry...

By Esther Ekong I am currently conducting my PhD research about Nigerian women entrepreneurs in ongoing global debates about the role of intellectual property (IP)...

By Sarah El Saeed The Egyptian Government has begun in pushing through a fiscal and monetary reform plan that includes various unpopular austerity measures. In...

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...

Earlier this year, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) held a two-day workshop on “Supporting Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Use the Intellectual Property System in Their Competitive Strategy” at the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology in Cairo, Egypt, which some of our Open AIR NERG members attended. The goal of this meeting was to discuss how to encourage young innovators to protect their inventions by patenting them at the Egyptian Patent Office. The workshop had vibrant and sometimes heated discussions between these innovators and government officials regarding many of the obstacles faced in the patenting process in Egypt.

Solutions to some of society’s most important challenges require the right regulatory environment to drive innovation. Examples include pioneering models for access to educational...

Open AIR's Northern African hub, the Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) at the American University in Cairo, is conducting research on open...

Authored by: Tobias Schonwetter and Bram Van Weile Abstract: Recognising the potential of 3D printing technology for facilitating locally relevant innovation and social entrepreneurship in...

Our Open AIR researcher Dr. Erika Kraemer-Mbula is continuing her exciting research in South Africa about informal sector entrepreneurs. Informal entrepreneurship is receiving increasing scholarly and political attention in Africa. The continent’s booming youth population calls for an unprecedented need to create income and livelihood opportunities. Besides the traditional focus on formalisation, there is a growing interest in understanding the creative processes and innovations occurring in informal enterprises. However, evidence remains scarce, and research on informal enterprises still represents a relatively new and unexplored frontier.

This is the first in a series of blog posts highlighting Open AIR’s latest working paper, A Framework for Assessing Technology Hubs in Africa, which will soon be published in the New York University Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law. This is the first paper to offer a framework for systematically describing and assessing the emergence of high technology hubs throughout Africa.