WIPOD – Intellectual Property Matters: Transcript of Classroom Conversations – Episode 3

Intellectual Property Education for Sustainable Development

Karen Lee: Welcome to Intellectual Property Matters. In this WIPO podcast, we explore the fascinating world of creativity, innovation and intellectual property. Let's listen, learn and get inspired.

Natalie Humsi: Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's episode of Classroom Conversations, a WIPO Academy series, and I'm joined today by Mr. Nikhil Seth, the Executive Director of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, UNITAR for short. Given his years of experience in education as it relates to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the UN SDGs, we wanted to chat about how IP education in particular is key for sustainable development.

So thank you so much for joining us today Mr. Seth, and I wanted to start off with a rather straightforward question. Why is intellectual property important when it comes to achieving the UN SDGs? It's maybe a big question.

Nikhil Seth: It is absolutely essential in achieving human progress and meeting most of the SDGs, if not all. I was in New York very recently where the High Level Political Forum was meeting to take stock of the SDGs in our rather grim times… war and conflict, climate change, the problems relating to other, you know, ecological issues like biodiversity loss, all these are really jeopardizing the progress of the SDGs. But everyone agreed that there's one silver lining in all this, and that's technology and innovation, and that these achievements are contingent on protecting intellectual property rights and crucial for the development and spread of innovation and technology.

So, everybody in New York, when they're taking stock of the SDGs, is very clear that unless we do much more on innovation and technology, we won't get to the transformations that we are saying that we need to see in agriculture, in water, in food security, in climate change mitigation and adaptation. So individual inventors, companies and organizations use intellectual property rights to find solutions to the world's most pressing challenges, including some that I mentioned, and in the fields of health, in the fields of food security, climate change, and in all the advances that are taking place in information and communication technologies (ICT) and artificial intelligence (AI). So IP harnesses innovation and creativity for the good of everyone everywhere.

SDG nine, when we were creating the SDGs, is one of the SDGs, which focuses in particular on innovation, to build resilient infrastructure, to promote sustainable industrialization and foster innovation. So the way to foster innovation is to protect intellectual property and incentivize people that what they create will be protected and not stolen from them. So, this is one of the reasons why IP is so essential for achieving the UN SDGs, and in responding to the critical crises of our times.

Natalie Humsi: That makes a lot of sense. And linking it back to your experiences with UNITAR and capacity building, intellectual property capacity building in particular, how does that enable sustainable development?

Nikhil Seth: An understanding of the fundamentals of intellectual property is essential. Recognizing intellectual property rights, understanding what is it that we are protecting, and how to use the intellectual property system to incentivize innovators and creators to find solutions, are essential to accelerating the UN SDGs’ achievement.

Secondly, intellectual property knowledge and skills at the governmental level can ensure effective and efficient intellectual property administration and legislative frameworks that innovators, creators and industries require to promote and incentivize research investment in these new innovations and to bring new technologies and products to market.

Thirdly, we need to train government officials, including diplomats, (and both our organizations are run in a large extent by international diplomats based in Geneva), on the importance and role of intellectual property in fields including climate change, food security, and public health. It is also crucial in ensuring that IP can be leveraged effectively as a tool for sustainable development at the global and at the national levels.

Fourthly, building intellectual property capacities in governments and amongst communities can also support economic recovery and efforts to build back better post-pandemic, ensuring that intellectual property is leveraged as a tool to boost economic growth and development.

Fifthly, capacity building, implemented in cooperation with governments, industry and civil society, can help to develop human resources, to build partnerships, align practices and lay the legal and technical foundations for the international intellectual property system to function smoothly.

Sixthly, capacity building in fields such as intellectual property is key to the implementation of the SDG on education to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Professional educational opportunities as well as intellectual property learning opportunities for youth are essential to ensuring that future generations recognize the value of intellectual property assets and an effective intellectual property system.

WIPO Academy’s Intellectual Property for Youth and Teachers service is targeted at the youth through gamified lesson plans on IP and support to educators via lesson plans and IP curriculum guidance to empower the young people to know the value of IP for societal benefits. The fact that it's gamified makes it interesting rather than a tough and difficult to understand course, people will have fun as they learn about intellectual property and apply it to their daily lives.

Natalie Humsi: Thank you for that. So you touched a bit at the end on the roles of agencies like UNITAR and the work that's being done at the WIPO Academy to support IP capacity building for development. I wanted to ask if you can talk a bit more about the services and offerings that are delivered by UNITAR and the WIPO Academy, and how those can equip with practical tools, those wishing to harness the potential of IP for their own development, and to help their own communities and eventually their countries and the world everywhere.

Nikhil Seth: Yes, the WIPO Academy offers a range of courses and programs to support development and foster innovation through building intellectual property capacity of government officials, supporting academics in their IP teaching and research, and providing IP education to junior professionals, students and the public who may be interested. The courses are designed and delivered in partnership with a range of stakeholders in national and regional IP offices, as well as universities and academics. So, it’s practical, it’s rooted to what people are already engaged in, and it offers great potential for the learner.

UNITAR, my organization, is also developing training programs for building capacities in some of these areas, and both of our organizations, UNITAR and WIPO are doing some joint IP capacity building efforts. Notably the WIPO Academy’s Primer on IP (DL-001) and General Course on Intellectual Property (DL-101), which are planned to be uploaded on something that UNITAR does well, which is on SDG learning, a massive online learning platform for the benefit of whoever wants to learn about the SDGs and their implementation.

The general distance learning courses of the WIPO Academy, are offered free of charge to all participants and some participants in certain professional categories such as government officials, and officials of Technology and Innovation Support Centers (TISCs) from developing countries, LDCs (which is the acronym for least-developed countries), and countries in transition benefit from scholarships for the advanced distance learning courses. So there's a lot on offer by WIPO and by UNITAR, and it's up to the learner now to use many of these resources – most of them are free of cost – to learn more about the intellectual property world.

Natalie Humsi: We always try to promote what is offered at the Academy and at our partner institutions because we really want to spread the good word of IP. And I wanted to ask if you have any advice that you could give our listeners, those tuning in to this episode, when it comes to IP training, IP learning, and IP skills development? Any practical takeaways that you can give them from your experience and knowledge?

Nikhil Seth: When people hear the word to intellectual property or IP, they get scared or daunted that this is a world that will take a lot to understand. But that's not the case. You have to seek out learning opportunities and there is so much out there which will help you learn better about this world. And whether you're an entrepreneur or an inventor, a diplomat, or simply out of curiosity through an inquisitive mind, IP can be relevant to you. And tailored training opportunities exist for all categories of people, for novices, for generalists and experts alike.

The interesting WIPO reports include the biennial World Intellectual Property Report, which analyzes the relation between innovation, intellectual property and the global economy, and the Global Innovation Index, which analyzes innovation trends around the world. I would advise you to seek out international IP training institutions in your own country or TISCs that have interesting and important tools and resources to support your learning. It's very important to know about it, regardless of where in this chain you are located, especially for entrepreneurs and for people who are doing innovation, it's good for you to know what's happening out there.

I remember when I was organizing the Earth Summit in Rio in June of 2012, I had gone to Stanford University and there literally in a garage, there was this young Ph.D. who was working on using fly ash to create catalytic converters for big vehicles like ships and for lorries. Look at the win-win here. He's reducing the amount of fly ash in the environment. He is using it to create catalytic converters and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But he was very keen that what he was doing would be protected. As a young 28 year old Ph.D. in chemistry working on improving the quality of the environment through this wonderful invention of his, till he was sure that his innovation would be protected, he would not be able to make the investments required to take all this to scale.

So, it's very important for these young entrepreneurs, for these young innovators, to be able to learn about IP should they do something innovative one day, so they can be sure that their intellectual property would be protected. So I'm just giving this an example to show how important all this is for wherever you are on the value chain of invention, innovation and technology.

Natalie Humsi: That's a very interesting example, and it's interesting to hear that you also were a part of organizing the Earth Summit in 2012. So you seem to be at the edge of all these changes and updates happening to the world, to the UN system, to sustainable development. So, I'm curious to know how do you envision the IP capacity landscape in the next couple of years, maybe shaped by COVID and different experiences and everything going on in the world right now?

Nikhil Seth: Let me loop back to where I started when I talked about what I heard at the High Level Political Forum in New York. There's so much expected in this world from innovation and technology for meeting the challenges of our current time and looking to the future. And of course, you talked about the COVID pandemic and what those two years plus have taught us really is how important ICTs and other technologies and innovations are in a world which has been deeply setback because of the pandemic and what we had faced.

But ITs and ICTs and the potential for reaching people and making massive gains especially in the area of learning and capacity building has also been one of the silver linings of that crisis. So I see this trend continuing in the future, there'll be no rolling back, and people will continue to use the new technologies for innovation, for reaching distant and remote people, for bringing prosperity to more and more people, for looking at ways of solving many of our contemporary problems, whether they are in agriculture, on water, on food security, on health, on you name it.

You know, every SDG has an intellectual property dimension and a dimension which is linked to innovation and creativity. So this is just going to increase. The landscape, I see it for the next decade would be very strongly driven by innovation. So this is what is going to happen in the future. And the more we concentrate on incentivizing these people who are looking for solutions to the problems of our contemporary world, the better it is. Provide them more security, provide them more incentives, provide them more resources around IP skills, let them learn practically about IP skills. And we need to reach out of course to many small and medium-sized enterprises and businesses focused on IP knowledge and skills. It is very important to be able to penetrate and reach out to people and be proactive in the search for intellectual property learning for all.

We are moving, as I mentioned, very, very rapidly into the digital space, and it is here that much of the work of intellectual property in the future will focus. And both UNITAR and WIPO must join hands to make sure that we proactively reach out to these communities. It's not only to the well-heeled, well-skilled and well-resourced innovator and entrepreneur who needs to benefit from knowledge about what can be done and the potential of IP. We have to be more proactive in reaching out to those communities who currently don't know enough about it. So the landscape is challenging, it's interesting, a lot is going to happen in that space that I've talked about and I think we should be there by everyone’s side to teach them more about how this IP world can be a strong accelerator of their work.

Natalie Humsi: IP really is the catalyst for innovation and creativity, as we like to say, for the good of everyone everywhere. Well, this brings us to the end of our classroom conversation for today. Thank you so much, Mr. Seth, for all these insights into the linkages between intellectual property education, capacity building, and sustainable development. And most importantly, I would also like to thank our curious listeners for tuning in and will catch you all next time on Classroom Conversations.