Ali Jazairy, head of innovation and technology transfer, WIPO, at the Open Innovation 2.0 conference at the Convention Centre Dublin. Photo by Conor McCabe Photography
Ali Jazairy, senior counsellor for innovation and technology transfer at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), tells us about the new trends in intellectual property (IP) at the recent Open Innovation 2.0 conference at the Convention Centre Dublin.
According to Jazairy, IP has to evolve as much as innovation has evolved. Over a number of decades, innovation has shifted from the individual working in a research lab to large research corporations conducting research and development on a grand scale, to networked innovation enabled by the connectivity of the 21st century.
IP has also evolved over the last century. Originally, it was about building fences up to the point of granting an IP title. “Today, IP is focusing on what happens after the IP grant. What you do with it through IP licensing, cross-licensing, creating patent pools and so on,” said Jazairy.
As Jazairy sees it, the new phenomenon of open innovation has triggered a shift from ‘intellectual property’ to ‘intellectual partnership’. This form of open innovation also uncovers opportunities for developing markets, which Jazairy illustrates with an example of reverse technology transfer from Kenya to Washington, DC.
#OI2Conf: Interview with Ali Jazairy, World Intellectual Property Organisation
