Published: 24 May 2018

A NEW report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) has established that better intellectual property protection established under international treaties does not necessarily result in better development outcomes in terms of local innovation and technology transfer.

The report, titled Technology and Innovation 2018, notes that strengthening patent laws has ironically led to increased patenting by foreign rather than domestic entities.

"In most developing countries, the vast majority of patent applications are filed by non-residents, potentially limiting the scope for local innovation in the technological areas concerned," says the report.

The report highlights the case of Zimbabwe where 67,9 percent of patent applications belonged to non-residents. In South Africa 88,1 percent of the 7 497 patent applications were by non-residents. The foreign uptake was 76 percent in Mozambique, with Kenya being the only country in the region with a low foreign uptake of 29 percent.

"The overarching challenge for developing countries to reap the benefits from frontier technologies is to learn, adopt and disseminate knowledge and technologies to promote sustainable development," says Unctad.

It further states that in developing countries with nascent innovation systems, most actors need to first develop a basic capacity to learn how to adopt, assimilate and diffuse existing knowledge and technologies, adding that this is an essential requirement for technology transfer, which is a complement to efforts to build endogenous innovation potential.

The report comes as President Emmerson Mnangagwa has called for the rewarding of those who would have made efforts in creativity and innovation, saying that they should be encouraged and recognised through awards, prizes as well as the requisite protection for their intellectual property.

"I exhort the Ministry of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs to ensure that copyrights and patents and all other rights of inventors, innovators, scientists and technologists are fully protected. More concerted effort must be made to fight against piracy; this vice dampens the spirit of innovation and creativeness," Mnangagwa said early this year at a conference of heads of institutions of higher learning. Urging institutions of higher learning to thrive to be technology incubation centres where innovations originate, he also indicated that these institutions have a leading role in shaping the economy through science and technology by being the test beds for innovation and educating future generations.

The Unctad report, however, highlights that access to affordable financing is a major constraint to research and development, technology and innovation; and that traditional financial systems have proved poorly suited to meeting the needs of innovation, particularly in the earliest stages of technology development and innovation.

"Successful innovation systems require a combination of public finance and development bank funding, often including grants, with private capital, market based solutions and philanthropic solutions," says the report.
- fingaz