Inclusive Innovation Ecosystems

Julio Raffo, Head of the Innovation Economy Section of the Department for Economics and Data Analytics at WIPO, and Elodie Carpentier, a WIPO postdoc research fellow, in Sept 2022 appeared on the podcast AUTM-in-the-air, a weekly podcast that brings conversations about the impact of research commercialization and the patent and licensing professionals, innovators, entrepreneurs, and tech transfer leaders who make it happen.

The podcast discussed WIPO’s diverse range of projects, what their research has shown about the impacts of war, COVID, and climate change on the evolution of innovation, and what WIPO is doing to hasten the pace of the slowly closing gender gap in the innovation space.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Authors Elodie Carpentier and Julio Raffo published a 2023 report as part of the WIPO Development Studies, in collaboration with Invent Together, titled “The Global Gender Gap in Innovation and Creativity” in an international comparison of the gender gap in global patenting over the last two decades.

This report analyzes women’s participation in international patent applications between 1999 and 2020 and finds that women are involved in only 23% of all applications, representing 13% of all inventors listed. Women’s participation in patenting varies across regions, sectors, and industries, with higher representation in biotechnology, food chemistry, and pharmaceuticals, and lower in mechanical engineering. Women inventors are more prevalent in academia than in the private sector, and typically work in mostly-male teams or alone. Achieving gender parity will require significant effort, with an estimated target year of 2061 based on current trends.

Click here for the full report.

Innovation Council Director Jennifer Brant and co-author Craig Moss, Executive Vice President-Measurement of Ethisphere published a guide titled “Improving Diversity & Inclusion in Intellectual Property Development and Management: A Guide for Organizations”.

The information and recommendations are based on research and insights that were shared during a series of closed-door roundtables convened by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and Invent Together in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Arab region during the period from October 2021 to June 2023.

72 representatives from corporations, technology transfer offices of universities and research centers, NGOs, and government agencies contributed their insights about the current state of intellectual property (IP) diversity, their reasons for prioritizing action in this area, challenges encountered, and actions taken to address the issue. While participants acknowledged that IP gaps affecting all historically underrepresented groups must be closed, these roundtables focused on gender.

This Guide is intended to provide a straightforward roadmap for organizations wishing to improve IP diversity and inclusion in relation to how innovation, that is, the creation and management of intellectual property, is managed internally. The core goal is to reshape the processes for managing and rewarding innovation within organizations to make them more inclusive.

See here for the full paper.

Innovation Council Director Jennifer Brant, alongside co-authors Elodie Carpentier, Utsav Bahl, and Aikaterini Kanellia published a global literature review earlier this spring (May, 2024) in WIPO’s Economic Research Working Paper No.86, titled ‘Closing Innovation and Intellectual Property Diversity Gaps: a Global Literature Review’.

See below for the full abstract:

Innovation is a driver of competitive advantage and economic growth, with patent rights playing a critical supporting role. However, differential access to patent rights and relatively less participation in innovation can affect women and people from other historically underrepresented groups, thereby hindering progress and limiting the potential economic benefits generated by innovation. This paper reviews the global literature on these “diversity gaps”, identifies their key drivers, and documents international policies and initiatives that show promise in addressing them. Building upon Shapanka and Fechner (2018), it expands the geographic scope and reinforces the scientific basis of their analysis. The paper also provides recommendations for a wide range of stakeholders and offers insights for fostering more inclusive and equitable innovation ecosystems.

See here for the full publication.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has just released it’s first-ever National Strategy for Inclusive Innovation in 2024, with support from the Council for Inclusive Innovation (CI2 ). The study includes a comprehensive review of the state of U.S. inclusiveness, highlights existing disparities, and explores opportunities to expand U.S. innovation in an equitable way. This strategy focuses primarily on innovation in STEM fields and the role of the patent system in the constitutional aim of incentivizing innovation and bringing that innovation to impact.

Click here for the full USPTO’s national strategy.

Invent Together, an alliance focused on broadening participation in inventing and patenting, published a new study in April 2024 titled “The Role of Trust in Advancing Equity in Innovation.” The study highlighted trust as a pivotal factor in an individual’s decision to pursue a patent for a new product or technology. The study identified significant trust gaps among women and people of color, which deter their participation in inventing and patenting. The study deepens our understanding of the barriers to equity in innovation and underscores the urgent need to build trust within the innovation ecosystem to safeguard U.S. global technology leadership.

Click here for the official press release and full study.

This report provides an overview of promising policies and programs for improving IP diversity, focusing on Europe. Utsav Bahl, our research associate, developed the analysis.

Across regions, women are using IP tools, such as patents, less than men. This analysis focuses on gender – but IP gaps affecting other historically underrepresented groups warrant equal attention from policymakers. Apart from identifying key policies, we note that a crucial first step is disaggregated data collection and analysis, to quantify IP gaps and identify causes, then to track progress in dismantling them over time.

This document was created as part of the initial research for a wider paper in collaboration with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on increasing access to IP for women.

This blog by the Center for Strategic and International Studies presents data relating to the United States’ CHIPS and Science Act. The authors argue that there is not enough funding approved to date, with billions of dollars missing from what was expected. They express concerns that this situation, if left unchecked, may affect the US competitive position in relation to critical high tech sectors.

Click here to read the full blog.

In 2022, the European Patent Office (EPO) released this study providing evidence and insights on gender and patenting across Europe. The study reveals that just 13.2% of inventors in Europe are women. While the percentage has been steadily rising, there is clearly still work to be done to close the patenting gender gap.

This report presents data regarding gender and patenting across a wide range of countries, for different time periods, patent application profiles, and in different technology fields. The report indicates that the gender gap in relation to patenting could be harming technological progress, for European societies as a whole, given that the ingenuity of all people is not being fully leveraged. It recommends that policymakers enact policies and programs to close the gap and increase access to patents for female inventors.

Click here to read the report.