Enabling Innovation Policies
Africa Young Innovators for Health Award
The 2021 edition of the Africa Young Innovators for Health Award focuses on supporting innovations that can make a difference to healthcare workers. This year’s Award program will be looking for and supporting innovative healthcare solutions aimed at supporting and equipping healthcare workers through solutions such as training programs, providing protective equipment or improving the quality of healthcare.
This Award provides mentorship, financial support, visibility and support with intellectual property protection of young African entrepreneurs’ healthcare innovation.
Applications close on 31 March 2021.
The pandemic has inspired and challenged medical innovation
The need for new and more effective methods of prevention and treatment is constant, and the spread of COVID-19 has emphasized that demand. During the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation’s “Healthcare Innovation during the COVID-19 Pandemic” discussion on February 12, experts from academia and industry examined the latest advances in the field and how the very process of medical innovation is being reinvented amid the greatest global health crisis in at least a century. One conclusion they found: Reinventing innovation can mean re-applying ideas used previously.
Trade in the time of pandemics
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the first female and first African leader of the World Trade Organization (WTO) argues why trade will help us find a way out of the pandemic with borders closed and global travel constrained.
The multilateral trading system is fundamental to fighting the current COVID-19 pandemic, preparing for future pandemics, and stimulating the global economic recovery. Trade barriers distort markets and create an uneven playing field, with the potential to reduce production when increased supplies are needed. To ensure that the multilateral trading system works smoothly and flexibly during a moment of global crisis, the WTO should play a more active facilitation role. It should work in close partnership with other relevant international organizations such as WHO, COVAX and the International Finance Institutions (IFIs) — to provide solutions to the pandemic.
Why benchmarking is essential to patent strategy
According to a study by Cipher conducted in association with IAM, 98% of patent owners rely on benchmarking to support their patent strategy. However, over half of respondents are unhappy about the time and expense involved, with a similar proportion lamenting a lack of objective and reliable data.
The survey results are a timely reminder of the critical need for well-organised and reliable data to support patent strategy. The strategic importance of patents is being increasingly communicated to audiences who are neither seasoned nor interested in their technicalities. What they require is clear evidence related to the decision at hand. The solution is to automate the manual processes preventing access to this data.
Why the differences in valuing patents and trade secrets matter
It is important, for a startup to understand how patents and trade secrets can be valued as assets, the positive and negative factors that go into valuing both, and how potential investors really view these assets.
Trade secrets may not have the same cache as patents to a startup because they do not come with a ribbon-affixed certificate, are not subjected to any examination process, and are often harder to define. But trade secrets can be just as valuable — and in some instances more valuable — than patents. This article explains the values of both patents and trade secrets to help align the IP strategy with the overall business model.
Malaysia to build 5G Network itself to speed up service launch
Malaysia will build 5G infrastructure itself instead of relying on private telecom carriers as it seeks to accelerate the roll-out of high-speed services.
Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin on Friday announced that Malaysia would invest 15 billion ringgit ($3.7 billion) over 10 years in the 5G network. The government will set up a special purpose vehicle that will own the spectrum and manage the network, he said.
IP Matters in Europe
The key findings from the joint study by the European Union Intellectual Property Office and the European Patent Office are presented in this Innovation Council infographic. The six figures show at a glance why IP matters, underlining the important contribution of IPR-intensive industries to the prosperity and competitiveness of Europe. The full study is definitely worth a read: it provides a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of how industries that make intensive use of intellectual property rights (IPR) contribute to EU economies. It updates and extends the findings of a previous study released in 2016. The original study can be found here.
Patenting and Covid-19 Vaccines
Patents have had an important role in organising the collaborations that led to the development and commercialization of COVID-19 vaccines. Patenting is a crucial tool in research-based industries like pharmaceuticals and biologics and can be a means to encourage collaboration. Terms can be negotiated to have different types of expertise combined in one project. The virus will likely garner another sort of PIP-type or any other similar program which will encourage contractual licensing of innovative IP in exchange for access to specialized expertise or important biological data. Monopolisation should clearly be avoided, and patent pooling must be the way forward to obtain sufficient vaccines for Covid-19 as early as possible.
Call for Applications: 2021-22 Edison Innovation Law and Policy Fellowships
The Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property (CPIP) at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School invites applications for a non-resident fellowship program designed to develop rigorous scholarship on intellectual property (IP), creativity, and innovation law and policy. The Edison Fellowship promotes excellent academic research about IP and related rights in the innovative and creative communities. The program consists of a series of invitation-only conferences over the course of a year. Over the course of these conferences, Edison Fellows work under the guidance of distinguished senior commentators, and with each other, to turn paper ideas into polished manuscripts publishable in law reviews or other academic journals.