Geographical Indication (GI) options for Ethiopian Coffee and Ghanaian Cocoa

Effects of the South African IP Regime on Generating Value
research funding in excess of ZAR 426,691 million, of which ZAR 102,591 million
constituted public funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF), the
Medical Research Council (MRC) and other government departments and science
councils, while ZAR 75,751 million came from external sources, including
the private sector and philanthropic donations. The rest came from miscellaneous
sources. The largest volume of research output in 2010, including graduate work,
was in the Faculty of Humanities (433 research units), followed by the Faculty of
Science (418 units) and the Faculty of Health Sciences (366 units). Most patentable
inventions stemmed from faculty members in Science, in Health Sciences,
and in the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment.
Patent filing
Working from its 2003 IP Policy, Wits has effectively complied with the Act,
transferring IP from inventors to the university, in the process securing “a cupboard
full of patents [while] the challenge is to take the stuff out of the cupboard,
get it out to the market and have an impact on society” (Wits Enterprise, 2012).
Historically, according to Wits Enterprise, the university has handled patenting
more as an academic exercise, spending on patenting but not on transferring patents
into outcomes. In the future, patenting decisions would need to be based on
all available information, in order to patent only where it will create value. The Act
also requires universities to drive IP for societal benefit, which, arguably, includes
economic benefit. Of these two approaches, patenting comes with the biggest formal
overhead and expense (Wits Enterprise, 2012). One of the key challenges for
the TTO remarked on by Wits Enterprise is to find ways to assist researchers in
becoming proficient in IP management. The institutional perspective is that there
is an onus on academic researchers to work for the public good, and the Act guarantees
that the inventor will share in the financial and non-financial benefits, even
though the university owns the IP (Wits Enterprise, 2012). Wits’s IP Policy has
historically permitted funding for Wits Enterprise to facilitate technology transfer
and patenting; however the university needs to research the market and network
with industry to operate in the broader ecosystem. University management does
not yet have all necessary systems in place (Wits Enterprise, 2012).
The Wits portfolio of patenting doubled every year between 2003 and 2011
(Wits Enterprise, 2012), following the introduction of the Wits IP Policy in 2003
(Wits University, 2003). Prior to this Policy, which requires academics to disclose
research that can be patent-protected, only a few small pockets of patent activity
existed at Wits, in industrial diamond technology, gene-silencing technology for
hepatitis B, and in bone generation. Today, the university’s patent portfolio covers
a relatively wide range of activity, including inventions in Health Sciences,
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