WIPO Director General highlights importance of Intellectual Property for Innovation and Technology Transfer
11th May 2010
The critical role of intellectual property as a tool for enabling innovation, the practical transfer of technology and industrial competitiveness were the focus of the remarks of WIPO Director General Francis Gurry to a key meeting of member states of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) in Vienna today.
Mr. Gurry said that the intellectual property system played a key role in facilitating technology transfer by incentivizing investment in innovation, providing a framework for trading intellectual assets, and by establishing market order through marks and brands. He noted that the innovation landscape was “the subject of rapid and radical change” pointing to the intensification of investment in knowledge creation which had more than doubled in the past 15 years rising to some 1.1. trillion US dollars in 2009.
The Director General also referred to the dramatic shift in models of innovation, and specifically, the arrival of open and networked innovation, which he said, “offers great opportunities for developing countries to share in innovation”. He emphasized that intellectual property in its broadest sense is a mechanism for translating knowledge into commercial assets noting that the means of production of knowledge was moving from the individual to the collective and from national to international.
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