31.03.2022
On 31 March 2022, EPO President António Campinos and ARIPO
Director General Bemanya Twebaze launched the online University IP outreach
and capacity-building pilot project.
The idea of the pilot came out of last year’s EPO-ARIPO heads
of office meeting when President Campinos and the DG Twebaze recognised the
challenges faced by most African universities in commercialising their IP
rights.
The Reinforced Partnership Memorandum of Understanding agreement
signed by the EPO and ARIPO in 2019 supports ARIPO in two aspects: firstly, building
capacity in examination in ARIPO and its member states‘ National Patent Offices
and secondly, supporting the development of the national and regional
innovation systems. Under the latter, the heads of offices agreed to implement
regional train-the-trainer programmes to develop institutional knowledge of the
IP and patent systems and disseminate patent information to create capacity in universities and academic and
research institutions.
„We believe that building sustainable capacity in science,
technology transfer, and innovation is essential to support local industries to
flourish in today’s increasingly integrated and knowledge-based economy“ said
President Campinos.
Some 25 universities from the ARIPO member states
participate in the pilot, as well as universities from Angola, Ethiopia and
Nigeria.
The first part of
the pilot establishes a basic understanding of the IP and patents systems. This
train-the-trainer course is based on the IP Teaching Kit developed by the European
Patent Academy.
In the second
part of the pilot, participants will be trained to use patent information
search tools, particularly Espacenet, the largest single source of technical
information in the world. A dedicated course was developed for the pilot with a
strong train-the-trainer element.
As an additional
measure, President Campinos invited the universities to take full
advantage of the learning resources and tools available in the PATLIB network.
The network consists of 330 patent information centres spread in the EPO Member
States, 40% of which are based in universities.
The pilot will
run from 31 March to 1 June 2022 and is likely to be extended to more countries
after the results have been measured and evaluated.
Further Information:
ARIPO
EPO Reinforced
Partnership Programme
Espacenet
PATLIB network