The Stockholm Network is delighted to announce a new policy briefing note, which explores the debate around standards, competition and innovation. As well as providing background on the relationship between intellectual property rights and open standards, the Polybrief also explores the debate between open and proprietary-based standards, as well as identifying and outlining new governmental approaches to standards.
Stockholm Network Polybriefs provide concise summaries of pressing issues and policy debate throughout Europe.
To view this Polybrief, please visit : http://www.stockholm-network.org/downloads/publications/Standards_Polybrief.pdf
We hope you will find this of interest and we look forward to hearing from you,
Stockholm Network
At its essence, the triple helix model is a partnership between the industrial, academia and governmental groups which recognizes the differing goals and stakeholder communities of these three groups but emphasizes on the common interest of those groups in order to provide value to the societies in which they reside. It is often operationalized as cosponsored programs. These programs support both small and large firms to transfer technologies from government and academic research laboratories and have enabled societies to more greatly benefit from the technological research that those same societies fund.
The landmark attempt towards the triple helix model was made by the U.S. when it enacted the Bayh-Dole legislation in 1980. This legislation granted permission for federally funded researchers to file for patents, and to issue licenses for these patents to other parties, thereby increasing participating of U.S. universities in national patenting. Conversely, in Eastern Europe, during the transition from socialism, some reformers were trying to remove government from a role in science and technology policy. Innovation systems were largely coming to a halt. Even though foreign direct investment was encouraged, it seldom involved utilizing local R&D resources. More recently, political leaders are moving away from that rigid position and bringing government back into the picture to take advantage of the R&D resources left behind from the previous era.
In the U.S., government-industry relations assumed increased significance in the 1990s even as university-industry bonds came to the forefront of attention in the 1980s. In much of the European Community these two sets of bilateral relations developed in reverse sequence with academic-industry connections following upon the development of government-industry relations. Academic-industry-government relations in the U.S. are taking on the cast that government-industry labor relations have long had in Europe. In the EU, EU sponsored activities, other efforts by European governments, NEXUS, IVAM are all examples of Government, Academia and Industry working together in order to maximize the commercial potential of macro and nano technologies in Europe.
This post in Part I on the larger area I intend to cover on the triple helix model for Technology Transfer on this blog.
Richard Barras, ‘Interactive Innovation in Financial and Business Services: The vanguard of the Service Revolution,” Research Policy, 19 (1990) 215- 37.
The issue of royalty payment has been recently discussed in an article “Public-funded R&D Bill — Creating the ecosystem for innovation” in The Business Line in India by Jyothi Datta. Relevant issue of royalty payment under Bayh Dole type legislation as per the article states:
“The draft Bill seeks to give back to the scientist or inventor, 30 per cent of the revenue from commercialization of his or her research. About 10 per cent is marked to the public-funded institute’s IP Management Cell and the rest of the revenue is ploughed back into the institute. The IPM Cell will help the researcher patent innovative work, besides negotiating with commercial institutions when it is ready to strike.”
Indian Bayh Dole like bill titled “Public Funded R & D Protection of Intellectual Property Bill, 2008” which is before the Indian Parliament provides that inventors receive 30 percent of any royalties stemming from licensing.A similar legislation in South Africa that was recently enacted known as the ‘Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Act’ that intends to enable and encourage recipients of government-funding to protect as Intellectual Property and license the results of their research in order to provide incentives for those recipients to work with industry players to commercialize research. Section 10 of the legislation provides that the creators and the inventors get a portion of the royalty stream generated from the licensing of the invention.
Jyothi Datta points out to the comments by Dr Prabuddha Ganguli, who was on an international expert team to help draft a similar legislation for South Africa:
“Parameters have also been outlined on the royalty that would be paid to the scientist/institute when the patented research gets commercialised, says the Bill’s architect. But IP expert Dr Prabuddha Ganguli, who was recently on an international expert team to help draft a similar legislation for South Africa, is uncomfortable with attempts to outline parameters on issues such as royalty payment. The legislation should be a broad guiding framework and specifics should be left to the rules that are made later taking into account in the changing environment. Though he has not seen the draft of the proposed Indian legislation, he points out that there are several texts and sub-texts to the issue — like whether the research has been fully or partially funded by the government; definition of national interest and if the government exercises its “march-in” rights on a critical product, does it pay for it, and so on.”
WIPO commissioned reports on Tech. Transfer of various Asian Countries in 2003 and they had a set of guidelines for developing models which were divided into 3 levels:
National Policy on Intellectual Property and University-Industry Technology Transfer.
University Policy on Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer.
Institutional Set-up and Practical Aspects for Technology Transfer from Universities to Industry
They include Income distribution (or royalty sharing) as a part of “University Policy on Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer” and not a part of the National Policy/ Law, that is also Dr. Gangully’s view on this issue as was published in an Indian Daily some time back.
In contrast Prof. Karen Hersey in her recent post “Royalty Sharing: A Matter of Law or a Matter of Policy” on the ITTI blog said that “setting a floor of 30% arguably accomplishes two things. first, it sends a message from government to research institutions receiving grants that the efforts of faculty and students who contribute to the process of innovation and commercialization is valued and second, it prevents grant recipients from, quite frankly, playing politics with rewards that their innovators justly earn.”
Although in an article published on SciDev.net, Shamnad Basheer (Ministry of HRD IP Chair Professor at WBNUJS, Kolkata) said that Indian IP Act would ensure that inventors receive at least 30 percent of any royalties stemming from licensing and the same is a laudable aspect of bill unlike the US Bayh-Dole Act, which leaves royalty-sharing policies to the academic institutions. Their remains to be dispute about the fact that having a mandatory provision for royalty sharing might not be the best of ideas and such specifics should be left to the rules that are made later taking into account in the changing environment or to the judgment of the University bodies, looking to their profits and the best way they can incentivize scientists and researchers to maximize the interest of the institutions.
“I see a system failing. It is doing something, but it is not solving the problem.” These were the words uttered by Purnima Menon, a public health researcher with the International Food Policy Research Institute and reported in a New York Times article on March 13, 2009. She was referring to the rampant malnutrition evident among children in India. Almost half of all children under three years of age are underweight or severely underweight and malnutrition among children accounts for more than one-fifth of the total disease burden. Surprisingly, this staggering rate of malnutrition is occurring in a country that has one of the fastest growing economies in the world and has shown substantial economic growth for over a decade.
Certainly prioritizing funding to this area is part of the problem both at the national (Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize-winning economist, noted that hunger was not enough of a political priority in India) and international levels (Ruth Levine noted in her blog that malnourishment is well known to be severely under-funded internationally). Yet, insufficient funding alone does not tell the whole story. India runs the largest child feeding program in the world and has a $1.3 billion Integrated Child Development Services program to combat malnutrition via financing a network of soup kitchens in slums and villages. Despite this substantial investment, the program has been, for the most part, unsuccessful largely due to the fact that the program is not well designed and does not adequately target the groups most in need of their services (i.e., children). For instance, the New York Times article noted above described one center in which there were no children; instead the food was being given to the few adults who showed up. It has been argued that this problem, which is reflected at the international level, is due to a lack of leadership and governance (see Source 3).
Many believe that the solution is greater governmental intervention. The author of a Lancet article addressing this issue back in January 2008 wrote, “The compelling logic of this scientific evidence is that governments need national plans to scale-up nutrition interventions, systems to monitor and evaluate those plans, and laws and policies to enhance the rights and status of women and children.” Likewise, a blog published on March 13, 2009 (Hanging in the Balance: Who Will Deal with Child Malnutrition?) argued for increased governmental (both at the local and international level) attention and action.
Given the demonstrated success of PDPs in the area of drug development for neglected diseases in developing countries, it is somewhat baffling why a similar approach has not been more aggressively pursued in this area. The hurdles preventing programs from successfully managing malnutrition seem to be similar to those present in developing drugs for neglected diseases. As has been noted, the primary impediment in India (and arguably in other developing countries) has been a lack of implementation and efficient use of resources. These are the very areas that the private sector excels at addressing. It has been frequently observed in the areas of vaccine distribution and health care innovations that the strength of the private sector is reaching markets and dealing with regulatory challenges (see Sources 4 & 5) while the public sector brings to the table a thorough knowledge of the needs of the country (i.e., areas that are most effected by child malnutrition).
There are some who might argue that the lack of short-term commercial returns would deter private sector involvement. We find this argument to be both unpersuasive and unsupported by the data. Regarding the funding of neglected disease projects, Mary Moran reported that commercial incentives were largely irrelevant to large companies. Rather long-term business considerations such as “positioning themselves in emerging developing country markets, or building access to low-cost, high-skilled developing country researchers” were the primary motivators.
This idea of using PDPs is not novel despite the fact that it appears to be underutilized in the area of child malnutrition. Three years ago almost to the day (March 9, 2006) a document was released entitled Tackling Child Malnutrition Through Market/PPPs: An emerging trend. In this document the director of the UNICEF Nutrition Program in India observed that “solutions from a technical point of view are known, but the lack of collaboration between government, NGOs, and companies, together with obstacles inherent in existing structures, prevent real progress. In addition, the business community’s involvement is limited mostly to providing philanthropy, rather than developing and offering market-based solutions.” In light of this, and past demonstrated successes of PDPs, one has to wonder why a greater amount of attention and resources are not being put into developing PDPs.
3. Horton, R. (2008). Maternal and child undernutrition: an urgent opportunity, Lancet, 371, 179.
4. Mahoney, R.T., Krattiger, A., Clemens, J.D., and Curtiss, R. (2007). The introduction of new vaccines into developing countries IV: Global Access Strategies. Vaccine, 25, 4003-4011.
5. Mahoney, R.T. and Morel, C.M. (2006). A global health innovation system (GHIS). Innovation Strategy Today, 2, 1-12.
6. Moran, M. (2005). A Breakthrough in R&D for Neglected Diseases: New Ways to Get the Drugs We Need. PLoS Medicine, 2, e302.
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