Technology and Knowledge Diffusion
Technological innovation has a transformative, enduring impact on people’s lives. In the past, inventions could be developed and diffused to society by one entity. Today, cutting-edge innovations flow through complex global R&D and value chains in order to reach people, and technology convergence across sectors is the norm. IPRs play an important role in this flow. They are used by many actors, including companies and research institutes, to manage and share their technologies and know-how, and to move their inventions out of the lab and into society. IP rights provide legal certainty and clarity as to each innovator’s contributions to a project and ownership of the outcome. Having IP protection encourages collaboration across organizations, industry sectors, and borders. Over time, this “open innovation” can drive improvements in human capital and innovative capacity, giving rise to centers of excellence. Innovation Council members share their insights about collaborative innovation and other channels for knowledge diffusion, and the policies and tools that make this possible.
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.
100% Recyclable Wind Turbine Blades
Innovative industries are working on a more sustainable way to produce energy. One example is LM Wind Power, one of the world’s largest makers of blades for wind turbines. These blades are designed to last for more than 20 years, but what happens to them when they are done spinning? In the past, they ended up in landfills, lined up like dinosaur bones. LM Wind Power wants to change that. The company, which became carbon neutral in 2018, is working with the wind industry to come up with blades that could be 100% recyclable in the future.
South Africa: Covid Vaccine Manufacturing
To battle COVID-19, the world will need vaccines. Expanding global manufacturing capacity is part of ensuring there are enough to go around. Biovac, based in South Africa, is committed to the long fight against the pandemic. The CEO, Dr Morena Makhoana, estimates that Biovac will be able to produce as many as 30 million doses of a Covid-19 vaccine. Biovac is part-owned by the South African Government. The company is still engaged in talks with global pharmaceutical companies regarding manufacturing and producing Covid-19 vaccines at its facilities in South Africa. The emergence of the second, more lethal variant has added some complexity – and urgency.
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.
How the pandemic catalyzed innovation in health IT, per 8 hospital execs
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated innovation at hospitals across the USA by forcing them to adopt new, digitally focused ways of delivering care, paving the way for further tech-enabled improvements after the pandemic subsides. In this interview, eight hospital and health system innovation leaders weigh in on how healthcare innovation trends have grown amid the pandemic.
The interviewees acknowledge that the pandemic has taken away everyone’s excuses as to why telehealth cannot work and instead made them focus on how and why it must work. Before the pandemic, most traditional brick-and-mortar providers in our industry saw telehealth as a threat and were thus quite biased to focus on its shortcomings. Not surprisingly, they were quick to point out why telehealth was not ideal – or even ‘dangerous’ – for ‘most’ encounters. Payers sang the same tune, as they have always been wary of the potential for unchecked overutilization of telehealth.