Towards a World of Multi-Polar Innovation
Seventh Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization
Geneva, November 30, 2009
Francis Gurry, Director General, World Intellectual Property Organization
The Honorable Andrés Velasco, Chairman of the Seventh Ministerial Conference
Your Excellency, Ambassador Mario Matus, Chair of the WTO General Council
Mr Pascal Lamy, Director General, WTO
Honorable Ministers, Yours Excellencies, Distinguished Delegates
I should like to thank the World Trade Organization for inviting the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to participate in this Opening Ceremony of its Seventh Ministerial Conference. I welcome the opportunity to underline the importance of the common area of policy - intellectual property - that our two Organizations share, as well as the importance of the cooperation between our two Organizations in relation to that shared area of responsibility.
It is now 15 years since the WTO joined WIPO in the field of intellectual property with the agreement that has become a household word, at least in diplomatic and trade households, TRIPs. Much has happened in those 15 years to change the landscape in which intellectual property acts. Production and trade patterns across the world have shifted; the value of the conceptual input to production has increased, as evidenced by the rising share of intangibles in market capitalization and by the investment of over $1 trillion worldwide each year in research and development (R&D); commercial activity was permitted for the first time on the Internet in 1995; the human genome was deciphered; the media of cultural expressions have converged; and the mobile telephone, with an estimated 4.6 billion subscriptions worldwide, has transformed both social communication and ways of doing business. These and other developments have ushered in the promise of a new world of innovation, one that is perhaps best described as a multi-polar one.
A new map is being drawn for the world of innovation. In 1994, when the TRIPs Agreement was concluded, North East Asia - Japan, Republic of Korea and China – produced 7.6% of international patent applications1. Last year, they accounted for 26.2% of all international patent applications. Each of their offices features in the top five patent offices in the world in terms of volume of applications. Asia, more generally, now accounts for 45% of first-degree science, technology and engineering graduates in the world2. The software industry in India has grown from $1.2 billion in 1995 to an estimated $60 billion this year3. The examples can be multiplied.
Geography, however, is not the only way in which multi-polarity has been expressed in innovation. It is also apparent in new approaches to the process of innovation. In the 20th Century, enterprises satisfied their innovation needs largely through their own in-house R&D programs. In the 21st Century, more and more enterprises are seeking to answer their innovation needs also through collaboration with other enterprises and institutions. This new tendency, broadly described as “open innovation”, has been driven both by the complexity of technology, which typically requires multiple technical sources for a single product, and by network technologies, which provide platforms for multiple actors located in geographically separate locations to participate in a common project, such as those associated with open source software.
These developments in the world of innovation have important consequences for international organizations. For a start, the speed with which they have transformed the landscape of innovation must give cause for all of us to wonder about the slowness of the multilateral process. Will the multilateral process be able to respond in a timely manner to the world of multi-polar innovation?
The developments have also underlined that, in the new world, technical infrastructure can be every bit as important as legal architecture - platforms can be as important as treaties as vehicles for international cooperation. One only has to think of You Tube and Twitter and to imagine if similar behavioral transformations could have been achieved with a treaty. Infrastructure in this area can take many forms. It may consist of global public assets, such as the aRDi database for scientific and technical journals that WIPO has, in cooperation with the International Publishers Association, made available for the least developed countries and developing countries; a database for technology disclosed through the patent system, such as WIPO’s PATENTSCOPE® database; platforms for adding value to such disclosures or connecting interested parties in relation to the disclosures; or platforms between actors in a given policy area, such as the Stakeholders Platform that WIPO facilitates between publishers and the World Blind Union to improve access to published works on the part of the visually impaired.
In the networked world, platforms are vital means of spreading the benefit of innovation, increasing participation in open innovation and improving the efficiency of technology markets. They can assist in helping to ensure that the new world of innovation is multi-polar not only in production, but also in access. They can be primary vehicles for achieving balance between incentivizing knowledge generation, on the one hand, and ensuring knowledge transfer, on the other hand.
As this Ministerial Conference opens, the world is facing two over-riding challenges – the challenge of finding the path to economic growth and the challenge of climate change. Innovation lies at the heart of the solution to both of these challenges. Its role as the residual source of economic growth has long been recognized and has been emphasized in many stimulus packages. Its function in meeting the challenge of climate change is to provide the technological and organizational means for effecting the transformation of our carbon-based economy to a carbon-neutral or carbon-free economy.
Innovation is the space between problem and solution or, in the words of an eminent Indian scientist4, the space between mind and market. An effective and balanced intellectual property system plays a vital role in that space. WIPO is committed to such an effective and balanced system and to assisting countries in developing their innovation strategies.
I thank you once again for the opportunity of speaking to you this afternoon and I wish you a very successful and innovative Ministerial Conference.
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1 Filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), administered by WIPO. In 2008, some 160,000 international patent applications were filed under the PCT.
2 In 2006. See National Science Foundation, Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, Ch. 2.
3 National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), The IT-BPO Sector in India. Strategic Review 2009.
4 Dr. R.A. Mashelkar, former Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in India.
