By Jonathan Mbiriyamveka
A two-day workshop on the importance of innovation and its capacity to boost economies including role that Intellectual Property Rights play as backbone of innovation for businesses or individuals to reap full benefits of their inventions opened Wednesday in Harare.
Organized by African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation (ARIPO) in collaboration with African Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation Project (AfrIPI), the workshop is aimed at raising awareness, provide training and promote ARIPO’s regional intellectual Property system for registering designs and utility model trends in the ARIPO region.
A utility model is also known as a ‘petty patent’. While a patent requires complicated technical requirements to secure legal rights, a utility model is suitable for inventions involving less technical input. A utility model must be new and useful. Most utility models consist of technical improvements to products or processes that provide a practical use or new effects.
The workshop aligns with ARIPO’s mission of ‘fostering creativity and innovation for socio-economic growth of the member states through an effective Intellectual Property System.
ARIPO Director General, Mr Bemanya Twebaze, said various intellectual property rights were available to innovators and businesses.
“Each intellectual property right has its own characteristics and type of protection that it confers.
“In the result, an important balance is created by intellectual Property Rights. On the one hand, companies can protect their intellectual property rights, be they patents, trade marks, copyrights, designs, and utility models, whilst on the other hand, customers can rest assured that what they purchase is legitimate and secure,” he said.
“It is therefore very important for innovators and businesses to identify what potential intellectual property assets they own and know how best to protect them.”
In the ARIPO region, he said, two of the lesser-known and less used intellectual property rights are industrial designs and utility models.
“Even though these rights are less known and less used, they can be extremely useful for smaller businesses, the SMEs.
“The aim of industrial designs is to protect the visual appearance of a product. The utility models can be a viable, relatively inexpensive, and easier option for the protection of innovations because, unlike patents, utility models require fewer technical requirements and less registration and maintenance fees,” Mr Twebaze said.
Over the next two days delegates will discuss industrial designs and utility models with two important stakeholders namely, on the one hand, Intellectual Property Offices that register and administer these intellectual property rights, and on the other hand, the main beneficiaries from the protection of these rights who are the innovators such as universities and Research and Development institutions.
AfriPI is an EU funded project, that started in 2020 and ends in 2025. Its geographical scope is the whole continent of Africa.
The objective of AfrIPI is to boost the African economy and foster trade between Europe and Africa. AfrIPI has 4 main components.
The first component is the promotion of international IP frameworks and the IP Chapter negotiations of the African Free Trade Area Agreement.
The second component is about capacity building. In this component, we mainly focus on IT tools that can bring efficiency gains and increased transparency, and also examination guidelines that bring increased quality decisions.
The third component is on the awareness of IP for African SMEs.
Only a few of the African SMEs are aware of the advantages that IP can bring to them and how it can make their business stronger.
This conference is one of the important activities organised this year for this component of the project.
The fourth component is dedicated to the geographical indications. An example of this is the French champaign or the Cameroonian Penja Pepper or the goat meat Cabrito de Tete in Mozambique.
They are local products that obtain their characteristics by being produced in a specific geographical area and can therefore really boost the local economy when properly exploited and protected.
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