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

Effects of the South African IP Regime on Generating Value
In conclusion, we now consider two particularly important themes that have
emerged from this research:
Building the new ecosystem
The following are levers for building the new ecosystem for publicly funded
research:
● from government: policy, legislation, regulations, supporting institutions
(NIPMO, TIA) and funding frameworks;
● from universities and other publicly funded research entities: IP policy,
externally funded work policy, TTOs and legal offices; and
● from industry: research funding approaches.
These levers are all necessary, and must be interlinked, in order for the knowledge
capacity and base of publicly funded research entities to be aggregated and
extended. For instance, legislation and regulations alone can only have limited
impact on the challenge posed by the fact that South African university research
tends to be underutilised at this stage in the country’s knowledge production
evolution, because most potentially commercialisable research is early-stage. In
addition to the fact that the Act and Regulations only deal with a tiny slice of the
research and innovation pipeline, we saw above that even on the matters specifically
addressed by these legal instruments, the instruments are vague on important
points, including the distinction between economic and social value and
modes of support for key activities in the value chain of transformation of IP into
both economic and social value.
Only an interlinked ecosystem, with the levers of government, public research
entities and industry combining effectively, can improve utilisation of early-stage
research and help bring it to later stages in a manner that can deliver on both commercial
and social objectives. The components of South Africa’s new ecosystem for
publicly funded research are still at an early stage of development, with supporting
institutions at state level and at public research entities (NIPMO, TIA, TTOs) still
in their formative stages. The role of NIPMO is protection- and support-related;
the role of the TIA is support-related; and the synergistic linkages between these
two bodies, TTOs and public research entities are still in an early stage of evolution.
There is also the matter of how to give both patenting and scholarly publishing
the attention they require for their combined future development. Attention
to one without attention to the other limits the potential of the IP landscape as a
whole. The Act’s focus on patenting, and lack of emphasis on scholarly publishing,
may be perceived as a weakness. This is because the production, commercialisation,
dissemination and socialisation of knowledge are all related endeavours.
309