Challenges in the implementation the WIPO Development Agenda: Is Bayh-Dole the Appropriate Answer to Promoting Innovation and Building Technological Capacities in Developing Countries

15th June 2008 • Co-organised with UNCTAD

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Dinner Discussion with
Professor Jerome H. Reichman,
Bunyan S. Womble Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law,

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) presented a dinner discussion on intellectual property rights and strategies to promote innovation and technological capacities in developing countries.

In September 2007, the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) General Assembly adopted a set of 45 recommendations on how WIPO could appropriately address the development implications of intellectual property rights (IPRs). In the upcoming second meeting of the WIPO Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP), Member States will continue their efforts to develop a work program for the 45 adopted recommendations, many of which aim at promoting innovation and the building of technological capacities in developing countries. These objectives also figure prominently in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Strategy on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property, which was adopted by the World Health Assembly in May 2008.

Activities seeking to promote innovation and technological capacities in developing countries through technical assistance, norm setting, and technology transfer need to be tailored to the particular economic and technological conditions prevailing in the target country. The successful adoption of innovation models from other countries requires in-depth knowledge of the regulatory framework surrounding these models, including the safeguards that ensure balanced creation and dissemination of knowledge in line with the objectives of IPR protection as enunciated under Article 7 of the TRIPS Agreement.

In order to illustrate the complexity surrounding the adoption of foreign innovation models without adequate adaptation to conditions in developing countries, Professor Jerome H. Reichman, Bunyan S. Womble Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law, critically reviewed recent policies and measures pending introduction in some developing countries that aim to promote the patenting and licensing by universities of the results of publicly funded research, following the model of the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act of the United States.

Professor Reichman’s observations were followed by an informal exchange of views among participants.