Victoria Henson-Apollonio, Manager of the Central Advisory Service on Intellectual Property, believes that the change process will provide an opportunity for much greater cohesion of many different facets of the CG system, among them the issue of IP.
In the past, she says, there has been too much fragmentation. For example, if a private sector organization asked the CG: ‘what are the rules on IP?’, they may have received up to 15 different answers from the different Centers. In the future, she hopes, partners will get a unified response from the Consortium.
However, there is a long way to go before this one voice can be formalized in a policy. First, the Centers – and their staff at all levels – need to go through a proactive, consultative process to make sure all understand each other. One of the first tasks is to document the IP resources we currently hold, which include scientific knowledge (which can be very country-or area-specific) as well as more tangible outputs such as new crop varieties.
Filed under: CGIAR AGM08, CGIAR Change Management, Stakeholder Reactions on CGIAR Change Management
It’s good to see Dr. Henson-Apollonio’s comments about intellectual property Understanding the current IP resources, practices, and policies of the Centers is indeed the logical place to start in building a unified strategy for the CGIAR. It was an honor for me to participate in an early IP assessment of the Centers 10 years ago, and now I agree that this is a crucial time to collect and apply the lessons learned through the continuing efforts of CAS-IP and the individual Center administrators responsible for IP over the pastt decade, to prepare for a very different future.