WEF-WIPO-IFIA on Harnessing IP

The World Economic Forum in collaboration with WIPO and IFIA and the Investors Assistance Program meeting on Harnessing Intellectual Property for Sustainable Development was held on Monday, April 29 from 14:30 to 18:30 at the World Economic Forum, Cologny, Switzerland.

Mr.Alireza Rastegar IFIA president , Mr.Nick Davis, Head of Society and innovation, member of the executive committee World Economic Forum, Mr. Marco Aleman the Director Patent Law Division of World Intellectual Property Organization participated in this meeting.
Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) to be truly inclusive, just, sustainable and genuinely human-centered requires a more democratic approach to the core innovations of the 4IR along with access to the availability of technologies to meet the needs of the marginalized, and vulnerable communities. This not least means leveraging the global innovation ecosystem to more rapidly find sustainable technological solutions to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Asking ourselves how to best achieve knowledge becomes the greatest source of positive change in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is essentially a question of policy, social innovation, and collective human choices. The World Economic Forum wishes to ask these questions and explore the answers in global multi-stakeholder dialogue and through entrepreneurial prototype projects and collaborations experiment with new ways of governing knowledge and ideas to serve the global public interest.

In all of this, the discussion that were around intellectual property regimes has become prominent. Today’s global Intellectual Property (IP) system is anchored in its evolution within advanced industrialized economies, and the adoption of the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). As the knowledge economy becomes an integral part of global economy and society is set to transform as a result, there is a desperate need to rethink how we value, govern, disseminate and spread information and knowledge that benefits all of society – from developed to developing nations alike. finally, they discussed what changes will be needed to the global architecture to define, protect and advance intellectual property in a beneficial way for economies and societies.