Inclusive Innovation Ecosystems

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.

According to Silicon Valley Bank, total healthtech investment in 2020 was $15.3 billion, compared to just $10.6 billion in 2019. While healthcare deals were up across the board, a trend towards telehealth, virtual clinical trials, and other remote practices helped bring digital health to the forefront. However, many great ideas failed simply because they lacked access to knowledgeable insiders. And those experts that did exist tended to be monolithic or act as gatekeepers rather than sources of valuable guidance. Shelli Pavone founded Inlightened to help bridge that gap and break the hold of those gatekeepers. By creating a vast network of diverse healthcare experts for innovators to tap for guidance, she hopes to nudge more good ideas towards solving healthcare’s most compelling problems.

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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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