Recommendations for Change in the Worldwide Patent System

The International Expert Group on Biotechnology, Innovation and Intellectual Property has recently published a report entitled Toward a New Era of Intellectual Property: from Confrontation to Negotiation. The group published the report in order "to assist policy-makers, industry, universities, researchers and NGOs in managing the transition from Old IP, under which companies and governments mistakenly believed that holding on to more and greater patents was the key to success, to New IP, in which actors recognise the importance of collaboration and sharing."

Section 5 of the executive summary's recommendations stresses the following for universities and the scientific community:

• 5.1. Universities should establish clear principles relating to
  the use and dissemination of their IP that includes ensuring
  greater access and the use of licensing provisions that make
  it easy to conduct research and development on products
  needed by low and middle income countries.
  
• 5.2. They should develop new measures of the success of
  technology transfer, development and social investment that
  correspond to social and economic return.
  
• 5.3. Business schools should include low and middle income
  country conditions and opportunities in their curriculum and
  should develop programmes through which their students
  can provide business planning assistance to low and middle
  income country entrepreneurs.
  
• 5.4. Universities in high income countries should collaborate
  with those in low and middle income countries to create educational
  opportunities at the doctoral and post-doctoral levels
  through which scientists maintain links with their countries
  of origin and conduct research focused on the needs of
  those countries. Universities in high income countries should
  encourage those of its professors from the Diaspora to assist
  their countries of origin through supervision of students, joint
  research projects, conducting peer review and so on.
  
• 5.5. Researchers should analyse questions of IP within the
  larger context of IP and innovation systems. To do so, they
  should use analytical tools that provide a broader, interdisciplinary
  perspective on IP and innovation.