This year’s SA Innovation Summit 2017 took place from 6 to 8 September in Cape Town at the Cape Town Stadium. It brought together academics, funders, founders, industrialists, entrepreneurs, inventors, business people and policy makers. The summit’s theme for 2017 was ‘Innovation Revolution’. It facilitated conversations on a wide range of topics, including BioTech, EduTech, AgriTech, Cities of the Future, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. The major aim of the summit was the creation of an enabling environment for entrepreneurs, promoting an inclusive and impactful platform that inspires meaningful change. The summit also looked at ways of accelerating innovations from idea to market.
One of the IP Unit’s doctoral students, Aleck Ncube, presented at the summit. The topic of his presentation was ‘Patent Information as a tool for Accelerating Innovation Development, in Developing Countries’. Choosing this topic came from his observation that the application of patent information to accelerate innovation and overall development in developing countries is an angle that needs to be vigorously pursued. In his view, developing countries must be active participants in legal and technical transfer of innovations, including through patent searching to identify technologies of interest, patent owners, and the territorial scope of patent rights. During his presentation at the SA Innovation Summit 2 he argued that access to information is a key driver for innovation and posited that patents are potentially a unique source of information, containing not only legal but also technical, business and potentially policy-related information. He concluded his presentation by stating that patent information, if made available properly, can facilitate the transformation of a resource-based economy to a knowledge-based one.