Industry, Researchers Make Case For Patents And Innovation At WTO

Panellists at a side event this week at the World Trade Organization reminded delegates of the view that patents and a strong innovative environment are key to innovation, and in particular to green technology. A Swiss start-up company developing a technology allowing industrial farmers to optimise their use of chemicals and pesticides said it would not have been able to launch and succeed without a supportive innovative ecosystem.

In the margins of the 6-7 June meeting of the WTO Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the event focused on intellectual property and innovation, sustainable resource and low emission technology strategies in practice.

The side event was organised by the “Friends of Intellectual Property and Innovation Group,” which includes Australia, Canada, the European Union, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Peru, Russia, Switzerland, Taiwan and the United States, according to a source. The event was moderated by Jennifer Brant of Innovation Insights.

Stefanie Mielert, head of legal corporate governance at Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, said Fraunhofer is an umbrella organisation for some 67 research institutes in Germany and in the rest of the world, founded in 1949, with the initial core mission to bring German industry back on its feet, and help inventions get patented.

According to Fraunhofer, the organisation is “Europe’s largest application-oriented research organization.” Fraunhofer is developing technical solutions and innovations for companies, but which will benefit society and strengthen both the German and the European economy, Mielert said.

The organisation has a unique role of bridging the gap between universities providing basic research, and innovative companies creating products, according to Mielert, who added that research  provided by Fraunhofer is demand-driven.

One of Fraunhofer’s success stories is the MP3 compression technology, she said, underlining the long process from conceptualisation to commercialisation. The patented technology has become a technical standard, but only one out of 1,000 patents manage to become a successful patent in the realm of technical standards, she said.

She underlined the importance of patents, and how licensing revenue allows the organisation to reinvest in their own research programmes. There is a lot of discussion on open access and open innovation, but that cannot mean for free. “Nothing is ever really for free,” she said.

It is important to choose the right type of IP for given innovations. Several models, such as the classical IP system, the standardisation system, and open access, will have to co-exist in the future, she said. However, “we have to be very careful not to harm or destroy a healthy patent and standardisation system,” she said.

Fraunhofer has several projects in green technologies, such as in clean water supply and solar energy.

Technology to Help Industrial Farmers Optimise Chemical Use

Yosef Akhtman, CEO and co-founder of Gamaya, a Swiss start-up company providing a technology for advanced crop analytics for large scale industrial growers, said the technology is patented by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) (EPFL), and licensed to Gamaya.

The technology can serve different applications, he said, however, Gamaya decided to focus on agriculture as they thought food production is the biggest challenge that human society is facing. According to some data, he said, food production will have to increase by 70 percent to feed 10 billion humans by 2050. Nobody quite knows how to address this issue, he remarked, as the productivity of land is falling dramatically and soils are depleted.

More than the quantity, the quality of food is an even bigger problem, he said. He gave the example of rampant obesity in the United States and health consequences such as diabetes, and the fact that some people eat a lot of food that is grown in a way which does not bring them adequate nutrients.

The technology proposed by Gamaya can optimise practice of industrial food growers, reduce the amount of chemicals and fertilisers they are using and also reduce their costs, he said. The technology allows soil analysis, monitoring growth of plants, disease detection, nutrient deficiency detection, and yield predictions, he said.

The company gets information from local agronomy and tailors the response according to local knowledge, by identifying specific bottlenecks in the production strategies or methodologies, and tries to address those.

This innovation was a huge breakthrough, he said, “but nothing we have done would have been possible without this very supportive innovative ecosystem that we have around us.”

Answering a question from the audience on patents, Akhtman said in the long term they would like the technology information to be put into the public domain to encourage others to use the technology.

“The whole world is moving toward the open innovation model,” he said, adding that unlike other resources, when you share information it multiplies.

GE: Patents, Stable IP Regime Key, Trade Secrets Important

Thaddeus Burns, senior counsel, intellectual property and technology policy for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America at General Electric, and a former US delegate at the WTO, said patents are very important for the company, which file about 3,000 patents a year.

He said it is important to have a stable IP regime that takes an optimistic approach for implementing TRIPS and that does not focus too much on figuring out how to wriggle a way out of obligations in the TRIPS agreement. Having a good IP environment is an invitation for companies to come and research, he said.

Discussions on intellectual property mainly focus on patents, but trade secrets are very important for creators, he said. National trade secrets legislation has made a lot of progress, such as Japan, which modernised its trade secret law, as well as the US and the European Union: in the US the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016, and in the EU the Trade Secret Directive, Burns said. The EU Trade Secret Directive was approved by the EU Council in May, with concerns by some that its protections for whistle-blowers were weak (IPW, Europe, 27 May 2016).

Trade secrets have received very little attention in the TRIPS Agreement, he said. “This is a tremendously important area for those companies that are investing in know-how..” It also requires less resources than patents, particularly in developing countries, he said.

Many small and medium-sized enterprises may not have a large patent portfolio but might have a number of trade secrets that they want to protect, and “every patent filing started its life as a trade secret,” he added.

EPO: Patents Supportive of Tech Transfer

According to Alessia Volpe, coordinator for public policy issues at the European Patent Office (EPO), the patent system has a dual role. The first is to support the innovation mechanism and the other is to disseminate knowledge contained in patent documents.

She presented the EPO Patent Information services; Espacenet, and PATSTAT. Espacenet provides access to 90 million documents from 90 patent authorities worldwide, she said, and is available free-of-charge. Patent information in Espacenet can be translated on the fly into 31 languages with Patent Translate. Espacenet is the largest patent collection free over the internet, she added.

PATSTAT is used for technology mapping and statistics, she said, providing access to 82 million patent applications from over 100 patent authorities.

Several empirical studies have been published by the EPO and co-authored with other international organisations, such as the United Nations Environment Programme, said Volpe.

One of the research projects looked at whether patents are a barrier to technology transfer to developing countries. According to the research, less than 1 percent of climate change mitigation technology (CCMT) patents are filed in Africa, and less than 3 percent of CCMT patents are filed in Latin America, “while all the information is available on the internet for free,” she said.

New research was launched on the impact of high patenting activity on innovation and transfer, focusing on Europe, she said. Presenting key results of the study, she said there is a steady increase in patenting activities in CCMT, and key inventors in such technologies are Japan, China, the EU, South Korea, and the US.

Europe is the main receiver of CCMT patent filings, she said. According to the research, there is a clear and strong positive correlation between the number of patents filed by foreign investors and the value of imports, as well as between patent filings and the volume of foreign direct investment (FDI).

Patent protection of CCMTs is very low in developing countries, she said, but it is growing, and she underlined the importance of high quality patent examination. Patents are supporting technology transfer via international trade and FDI, she said.

 

Image Credits: Catherine Saez