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

Perspectives on Intellectual Property from Botswana’s Publicly Funded Researchers
Table 15.1: Knowledge of institutional IP policies
Institutional IP policies Yes No Don’t know
Number % Number % Number %
Does your institution have an 98 54.2 20 11.0 63 34.8
IP policy?
Is the policy environmentally 57 36.0 17 10.8 84 53.2
friendly?
Does the policy encourage 60 38.5 22 14.1 74 47.4
innovation?
Does the policy spell out the 62 39.4 15 9.6 80 51.0
management of IP?
Does the policy clarify 60 38.5 12 7.7 84 53.8
ownership of IP?
Does the policy encourage
openness in sharing
information from publicly
funded research?
56 36.6 15 9.8 82 53.6
in relation to potential conflicts of interest concerning ownership, management,
protection and exploitation of IP, and 41.7% knew of provisions recognising the
IP rights and needs of stakeholders involved in research.
On how institutional IP policies impact knowledge utilisation, 56.3% of
researchers understood that their institution’s policy encouraged openness in
sharing information from research, while 48.3% knew that it required researchers
using public funds to publish outputs through open sources, conferences,
workshops or through patenting. The majority of the researchers did not know
whether knowledge transfer offices (KTOs) in Botswana were financially
supported by several funding sources, including public authorities (64.1%);
whether government policy in Botswana requires organisations receiving
public funds to comply with any national interest policy (51.4%); whether
Botswana national policy granted the public free and unrestricted access to
cultural works supported by public funds and publicly funded collections and
activities (57.1%), or free and unrestricted access to government-collected data
(57%), or free and unrestricted access to output of publicly funded research
(54%) (see Table 15.3).
The research (Table 15.4) found that the majority of respondents did not
know that their institution’s IP policy encouraged commercialisation of research
output. For instance, 69.2% did not know whether Botswana’s IPA assigned PROs
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