Intellectual Property & Development: Towards a Strategy

This article considers the impact of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in developing countries. After an initial phase of ''paper compliance'' with TRIPS, followed by efforts to manage the welfare costs of its implementation, a number of developing countries are looking at ways to optimize the implementation or reimplementation of the agreement to foster domestic competitiveness and innovation. One part of the equation involves attracting technology-intensive foreign direct investment. Another involves enhancing local innovation potential. Surfing the wave of outsourcing, which increasingly targets higher knowledge functions, a number of developing countries are becoming globally competitive innovators and displacing the geographical centres of innovation, with substantial political and economic impacts.

Journal of International Management, 2019

Indices that approximate for the quality and strength of intellectual property (IP) systems are commonly used as variables in empirical international management studies. However, while international IP systems have radically transformed after the implementation of the TRIPS agreement, these contextual changes have not been accounted for in existing international management research approaches. This study examines the institutional context of IP systems in the post TRIPS implementation years by conceptualizing how IP Law on the books (regulations) and IP Law in practice (enforcement) combine. This enables the identification of two new contextual categories of IP systems that have not been conceptually, theoretically, or empirically captured in existing international management research. A review of the existing literature on indices measuring different aspects of national IP systems provides insights into how to improve future theoretical and empirical international management work that aims to study the effects of the context of IP systems in the post TRIPS era.

Knowledge Generation and Protection, 2009

Knowledge embedded as a proportion of the total value of a product grows by the day in all sectors. Technological development is not only present in industrial goods but also in agricultural processes and in services. Capabilities for research, creation, and appropriation of knowledge and its transformation into new technologies form part of the foundations of wealth in the most developed nations and largely explain their economic growth. In this regard, analysis and debate on how to generate knowledge, technological innovation, and development is a topic of utmost importance for the developing countries. As of the entry into effect of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in 1995, the architecture of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) has gradually become more complex. TRIPS has been promoted mainly by the most developed nations, and bilateral trade agreements have progressively incorporated diverse complementary rules, some of them known as TRIPS Plus for extending intellectual property beyond the original TRIPS. The mechanisms for intellectual property protection -patents, trademarks, geographical indications, copyright, breeder rights, etc. -present two important aspects: on the one hand, they are forms of appropriation of income that generate monopolistic or quasi-monopolistic gains for their holders and, on the other, they are financial incentives for research inasmuch as they remunerate the innovator for the investments carried out until succeeding in turn their innovations into market products. Both aspects are examined in this chapter.

Mich. St. L. Rev., 2007

2009

Social Science Research Network, 2009

Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) have become ubiquitous in the current debate and have emerged as the key issue of global innovation policy. The 'Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights' (TRIPS) Agreement, signed in 1994 as a founding element of the World Trade Organisation, represents the most important attempt to establish a global harmonisation of Intellectual Property protection. The aim of this article is to reexamine critically what has become the common wisdom around IPRs, TRIPS and their effects. We argue that supporters of IPRs in western corporations and governments as well as detractors in global movements and developing countries have overestimated their importance in the process of generation and diffusion of knowledge and innovation. On the basis of some key learned lessons on the nature of innovation and technological change, we assess four theses about TRIPS and its impact on the global generation and distribution of knowledge. Finally, the policy implications concerning international organisations and technological transfer are discussed.

Business Information Review, Vol.20 No.3, pp.149-157, 2003

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Intellectual Property (TRIPS) in 1994, the innovative landscape has undergone dramatic changes due to technological advances in fields such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, and digital communications and computation. The increasing potential for user innovation, and open and collaborative innovation has brought an explosion of innovative activity that does not fit into the sales-oriented, mass market model which underlies the global intellectual property regime. In this Article, I argue that the debate over global governance of innovation should be expanded to account more fully for the implications of these changes. For the most part, criticisms of TRIPS have focused on its failure to account adequately for current needs for access to the fruits of innovative activity. In particular, critics have focused on the agreement's failure to balance urgent public health needs appropriately against the marginal boost to pharmaceutical innovation supplied by patent protection in developing countries. Here I take a different (though complementary) tack, focusing on the ways in which TRIPS and related agreements enshrine an unduly narrow approach to innovation itself. An adequate global governance system for innovation must take account of the diversity and dynamism of modes of innovation. I propose a re-imagining of the World Intellectual Property Organization as a broader-based innovation policy organization and a global administrative law approach to accommodate evolving modes of innovation.