Technology and Knowledge Diffusion
Public–Private Partnerships for Climate Technology Transfer and Innovation: Lessons from the Climate Technology Centre and Network
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Agreement, and a number of other important agreements call on the United Nations (UN) to strengthen its relationship with the private sector in order to facilitate global action on climate change. The Technology Mechanism (TM), for example, anchored in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, is a key enabler for the attainment of the Goals of the Paris Agreement, growing interest in collaboration with the private sector has created new ambitions within the UN’s Climate Technology Centre and Network (CTCN).
One of the primary reasons to pursue such increased engagement with the private sector is the importance of technology transfer: many of the technologies that can help mitigate climate change exist in various private companies, and sharing this technology safely and responsibly is key to using it on a large scale. This paper reviews and analyses the role of the private sector in facilitating technology transfer that is undertaken as a part of CTCN’s provision of Technical Assistance. Based upon this analysis, several recommendations are made regarding how best to enhance public–private partnerships in order to strengthen private sector participation in climate technology transfer activities, and there is a special focus on technology–push and market–pull innovation.
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Indonesia adopts blockchain to grow music industry IP
Irfan Aulia, who runs Massive Music Entertainment, wants to launch the Portamento project to help Indonesian musicians who have uploaded their works to the database to track and monitor downloads and usage of their music online, in order to calculate royalties due.
“By matching and commercializing the database, the metadata, we believe the Indonesian market for copyrights will increase over five to ten years,” says Irfan. “Basically, we are creating our own big data which will be accessible to all users. This is actually the goldmine.”
Indonesia has around two million music works, of which only 300,000 are recorded. This missing intellectual property could play a key role in the development of the creative economy, says Hasan Kleib, Indonesia’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva.
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Ideas Powered initiative: Believe in the power of ideas
Ideas Powered is an initiative by the European Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) to raise awareness of the value of IP and the importance of respecting it. Trademarks, designs, patents, and copyright, as well as geographical indications and other IP rights, help individuals and businesses develop and grow, and to share their ideas, creations, and products.
Part of Ideas Powered’s mission consists of explaining to young Europeans how to protect their creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, a practice which should be deeply rooted in any education fit for the 21st century.
Innovation for Sustainable Food Production: Shiok Meats, Singapore
On the occasion of the WTO TRIPS Council online side event focusing on the intersection of innovation, IP and sustainability – which will take place on March 9 at 16:00 – we are re-posting some resources about IC member Shiok Meats. Shiok Meats is a Singaporean company that produces cell-based crustacean meat. Shiok Meats plans to bring healthy, nutritious, environmentally-friendly and cruelty-free crustacean meat to tables everywhere in the coming years, disrupting the global shrimp market which is worth an estimated 40b USD annually. This month marks the one-year anniversary since the Singaporean innovators introduced their first shrimp dumpling. Shrimp grown from cells has several advantages over wild caught shrimp or shrimp raised through aquaculture – notably in relation to health, environment, and labor impacts – but further innovation is required to bring down production costs. This is the goal of the team at Shiok Meats over the next 2-3 years.
Read more:
Shiok Meats Raises $4.6 Million Seed Round To Develop Cell-Based Shrimp
How artificial shrimps could change the world
Singapore’s Shiok Meats hopes to hook diners with lab-grown shrimp
5G in sports: Here’s how event experiences will transform
Peter Marshall, 5G Principal Lead for King’s College London, explains the future of event experiences and four areas where 5G can enhance the fan experience. These areas are essential to reversing the current trend of aging sports fans and matching the continuing rise of media rights fees with improved experiences. It’s a task that could pull in a bigger crowd into venues, and bring stadiums and arenas closer to fans at home. It’s also a business projected to generate USD83.1 billion in revenues by 2023 in the US alone.
The sports and media industries face two significant trends. The first is that the average age of the fan base is increasing. It varies between 40 and 64 years for classic sports, and hovers around the mid-twenties for esports. The second is that media rights deals for live sports are reaching extraordinary new levels. Both these factors are putting the digital transformation of sports and media in play.
Five things to keep in mind when thinking about 5G
5G will be ubiquitous, but the picture is more complex than simply “adding 5G” to services. The 5 points raised in this article show that 5G will be absolutely critical to connectivity and businesses moving forward. But it does mean that especially during this pivotal stage when networks are rolling out and maturing, businesses should think carefully about what they need from their 5G network and evaluate options based upon those particular needs. 5G is not just about increasing speed and therefore mobile activity, it is about going beyond that and across the different spectrums, most especially in areas that have poor data infrastructure currently.
Considering All Sides of Medicines Patents
For many years, policy experts and others have engaged in wide-ranging debates about patents on pharmaceuticals, particularly in developing countries. On the one hand, it has been argued that IP protection provides crucial incentives to the pharmaceutical industry to undertake more research on tropical diseases. On the other hand, the patenting of pharmaceuticals has been criticised as causing challenges regarding access to medicines. The brief examines in detail the rationale for patenting medicines. The examination includes an investigation into the role of the patent system in relation to the pharmaceutical industry, the moral limits of patents, how the exclusion of a patent can create social costs, the rationale for the patenting of medicines and the incentive theory and how this can be balanced with access to medicines.
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.
Life Sciences: Trade Secrets and Data
Life science reporter Adam Houldsworth explains in this article that the pandemic has made it more important than ever to prevent the misappropriation of trade secrets. Pharma and biotech scientists have become more mobile and better able to access valuable information remotely and online (which has probably increased significantly this year). Complex patterns of R&D collaboration between companies and licensing also contribute to these risks, as do growing commercial incentives to find better ways to produce biosimilars. In addition, innovators need to have a strategy in place to protect the confidentiality of regulatory data following the ECJ decision and should consider this early in their R&D process. A clear data strategy on how to commercialise this in new ways is increasingly important – licensing data can save companies time and money and bring new therapies to market faster.