Inclusive Innovation Ecosystems

Following the whitepaper on “Reasonable steps” to protect trade secrets, (you can find a brief overview and the link to the paper here, CREATe.org published its Eight steps to secure trade secrets.

The purpose of this guide is to help understand the management system component of trade secret protection. It provides you with practical advice and tools so you can more efficiently develop and implement a trade secret protection program that is appropriate for your company and the risks it faces. This guide starts by providing a roadmap for you to use in starting, or enhancing, a trade secret protection program. Next, the Guide looks at each of the eight areas of an effective trade secret protection program in more detail. For each area – called business process categories – there are specific activities that you can use as a checklist against your current program or for improvement project ideas. These check- lists are just a starting point – each activity can be broken down into a greater level of detail or be fine-tuned to your specific priorities.

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Protecting companies’ confidential business and technical information – “trade secrets” – is becoming a major priority of the private sector and governments around the world. Trade secrets and other intellectual property and intangible assets represent the bulk of the overall value of many companies.

The authors of this whitepaper from the Center for Responsible Enterprise And Trade (CREATe.org) review the “reasonable steps” requirement for protecting trade secrets. They look at international, regional and national laws and legislation; consider the types of protections that companies have implemented; and look at court cases that examine “reasonable steps” taken by companies.

National and regional laws – perhaps unsurprisingly in a globally connected economy – continue to converge as to the elements required for proprietary information to qualify for legal protection as trade secrets. It is thus vital for companies to understand what “reasonable steps” need to be implemented to protect trade secrets in accordance with these laws, and to look to leading practices that companies around the world are using to protect such information. The very legal protections that a company hopes to secure for its proprietary information very much depend on taking such “reasonable steps.”

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This paper by Jennifer Brant and Sebastian Lohse intends to inform policymakers about the contribution of trade secrets to knowledge transfer and collaborative innovation, with emphasis on technological know-how. It also aims to inform policymakers about certain shortcomings in existing frameworks for trade secret protection, which can undermine cross-border collaboration in particular.

The authors of this paper describe the value of trade secrets to innovative firms of all sizes and the role of trade secret protection in facilitating knowledge flows. At the same time, it identifies several factors that complicate the protection and management of trade secrets in today’s business environment. Many of the factors relate to the business environment itself, which is characterized by networked R&D and open innovation, globally dispersed teams of employees, increased employee mobility, digital storage of data, and the growing value of know-how as a source of competitive advantage – and thus a target for corporate theft.

Other risk factors derive from inadequate legal frameworks for trade secret protection, which make it difficult for trade secret owners to recover in the event of misappropriation. Legal fragmentation across countries, and even within countries and economically integrated areas, compounds this difficulty and further compromises collaboration and the sharing of know-how with external partners.

To overcome the challenges described in this paper, policymakers and industry groups may consider providing training for SMEs, to guide them in using trade secrets as part of their intellectual asset management strategies. Compared to larger firms, SMEs have relatively lower levels of experience with and fewer resources to dedicate to IP management. Innovative SMEs are likely to benefit from training on the appropriate actions they must take to protect confidential business information, in order to be able to enforce their rights before the courts in the event of misappropriation. They could also benefit from insights into how to institute effective processes for managing confidential information internally and vis-à-vis partners.

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The whole world is waiting for the distribution of vaccines against COVID-19 and should be distributed to all adults globally over the next 18 months. Calls are getting louder that intellectual property rights (IPR) should be suspended to allow unfettered vaccine manufacture will mean faster access for developing countries. The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, gave tacit support this week, warning of a “catastrophic moral failure” caused by unequal access to COVID vaccines. However, IP has played a vital role in every step of vaccine research, manufacturing and distribution. The Pfizer/BioNtech partnership behind the first vaccine to be authorised in the US would not have taken place without strong IP rights.

In a competitive market, no single company will monopolise COVID vaccines or succeed in “profiteering”. A zero IP world would be a backward step and discourage companies from making urgently needed refinements to existing vaccines to combat new COVID-19 variants.

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In their 2021 annual letter themed ‘the year global health went local’ released by Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, they are reviewing the epidemic in 2020 and addressing the future.

Gates stressed that cooperation between China and the US is critical to combating the pandemic, including ending the current pandemic and preventing the next one, while he pointed to China’s continuing technological advances, improving regulatory capabilities and a growing willingness to help the world.

Roberta Lipson, founder of United Family Healthcare, agreed that there is plenty of room for cooperation between China and the US, first and foremost in healthcare amid the epidemic’s hardships. High tariffs make the use of imported products more costly for both countries, said Lipson, adding that elimination or reduction of these duties would give patients in both countries access to the most suitable products at reduced costs.

“Opening the market for leading-edge therapies and medicines will also benefit from level playing fields in central procurement as well as reliable intellectual property rights protection,” said Lipson.

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AI technologies including machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing can be harnessed to process vast data sets to identify new drug candidates, optimize drug dosing, match patients with drug trials and diagnose diseases. Recognizing this potential, global biopharma companies have invested heavily in AI technology—the AI in life sciences market was valued at USD 1092.44 million in 2019 and is expected to reach USD 3445.60 million by 2025. But what happens to the IPRs? Can AI be an IPR holder?

This article provides answers to important questions about (future) IP ownership:

1. Life science companies utilizing AI can mitigate potential IP ownership issues by defining ownership of AI-related IP rights in employment, licensing, or purchase agreements.
2. Aside from general contractual protections of IP, life sciences companies should consider what type of IP protection is appropriate for their AI-related inventions.
3. If patent protection is more appropriate (e.g., where the requirement of secrecy for trade secret protection is hard or impossible to meet), the companies should adopt an “AI-Patent Playbook” as follows to obtain patent protection for AI-related inventions.

The strategies described in the article could be adopted to minimize the risks while still harnessing the powerful potential of AI technology.

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Ending the COVID-19 pandemic requires innovation. IP is part of the solution and drives competition. IP licensing allows the innovator to control which partners manufacture the product, ensuring high quality supplies, and to maximise low-cost access for low and middle-income countries. Philip Stevens and Mark Schultz show that the reality is different from what calls for the suspension of IPRs suggest in order to keep prices low and address supply shortages. A highly competitive market in COVID-19 vaccines is unfolding right now. There is no evidence that abolishing IPRs will achieve anything more than the licensing agreements currently in place between innovators and big-name vaccine manufacturers in countries like India and Brazil; and the emergence of procurement mechanisms like COVAX. The authors demonstrate how the IP system has put us in a position to end the pandemic and why we should allow it to continue doing its job.

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The patent war of the 1850s may have been a long time ago, but it is still relevant. Adam Mossoff shows how the invention and incredible commercial success of the sewing machine is a powerful display of early American technological, commercial and legal ingenuity that heralds important empirical lessons for understanding and applying patent thievery theory today.

The Sewing Machine War demonstrated all these phenomena, including the effects of patent trolls, and proves that this is an age-old problem in patent law. The untangling of this patent thicket in the sewing machine combination of 1856, led to the first privately established patent pool. This also challenges the conventional wisdom that patent thickets are best resolved by public law rules limiting ownership of patents.

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Speaking at a panel organized by the World Economic Forum and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), ministers from Canada, Denmark, Italy, Japan, Singapore, United Arab Emirates and United Kingdom announced their plan to lead the world in fostering responsible innovation and entrepreneurship. The Agile Nations Charter sets out each country’s commitment to creating a regulatory environment in which new ideas can thrive. Read full article here.

When the American patent system becomes more diverse, America’s innovation economy becomes stronger and more successful. Inventors who hold patents consistently earn higher incomes than non-inventors, and businesses with patents—especially small businesses and startups owned by women and people of color—are better able to access capital, attract customers and licensees, and create jobs than businesses without IP.  Inventors, academics, industry leaders, advocacy leaders, policymakers, and other stakeholders must work together to close the patent gaps for women, people of color, and low-income individuals to help close wage and wealth gaps, strengthen the U.S. economy, and develop new and different inventions. This webinar discusses how policymakers, educators, and the private sector are working to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to invent and patent.

This WIPO tool enables users to undertake a basic diagnostic of the intellectual property situation of their business. It is in the form of a questionnaire with several sections that asks questions on different IP topics (e.g. innovative products, trademarks, licensing, designs, internationalisation, etc.). The tool then generates a report that gives recommendations and further information on IP and business competitiveness.

The SME ecosystem needs more partnerships to encourage a favorable environment where SMEs can develop and reach their full potential in business. A new collaboration agreement between EUIPO and the International Network for Small and Medium Enterprises aims to do just that. This collaboration agreement enables both organizations to work in pursuit of a common goal, to foster growth and empower SMEs.