An entrepreneurial breeze is wafting through the dusty corridors of academia with a new law aimed at extracting the inventions and research by South Africa’s universities for use by the country’s social and commercial entrepreneurs.
But fears have been expressed that researchers may start shutting their doors to what they could perceive as a bothersome wind.
“Many of us believe this will diminish the disclosure of invention,” says Charles Marais, chief executive of Wits Enterprise, a company that manages the commercialisation of inventions and research generated by Wits University.
The Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Act was promulgated in December and the first set of regulations issued by the minister of science and technology comes into effect on June 1.
The law declares all inventions generated at publicly funded institutions -— universities and organisations such as the Medical Research Council —- belong to the institutions and not to the individual inventor. It obliges the institutions either to patent and commercialise their inventions or to forfeit them to the state.
“The state essentially says ‘commercialise or we’ll take it’ —- a lot of stick and very little carrot,” says Marais.
A similar law in the United States led to “an explosion of patenting”, bringing inventions lying dormant in academic offices into the open and to the notice of entrepreneurs.
In South Africa, however, the law threatens to quash disclosure with heavy-handed regulations, which require researchers to log all their work at the new National Intellectual Property Management Office (Nipmo), disclose their intent to patent and commercialise or to provide reasons for deciding not to.
“There is an outcry about the regulations, the detail of the law. You have to run to [Nimpo] every time you want to do anything. It seems onerous to many universities. Everything has to pass by the state and be okayed by the state.
“Whether academics will disclose [their inventions] when they hear that they have to disclose, you know, that’s just trying to herd cats. I don’t know if that will work,” says Marais.
He is concerned that the law seems to forbid state-sponsored academics to make their work available for the public good without permission from government.
“So, for instance, free and open software —- that we’re not allowed to do unless we ask the state. No one in the world does that. The intention to control by state is worrying.”
With a lighter regulatory hand, the law has the potential to unlock treasure inside the country’s universities for its entrepreneurs, says Marais. A lot of good has flowed directly from the law, which requires all state-funded research institutions to establish an office to manage “technology transfer” to broader society.
“When we heard that this law was being designed, there was an explosion of activity at the universities to get their technology-transfer functions ready,” Marais says. “There is a lively conversation between universities — great co-operation between them -— on the technology-transfer front. We talk to one another about what technologies we have, what problems we have commercialising them. We share our war stories about what’s difficult, what’s easy.”
The law incentivises individual inventors at state-funded institutions by prescribing a reward of 20% of income generated by a commercialised invention up to the first R1-million and 30% of net income after that. Marais describes the incentive as “okay”, but adds that Wits’ incentives for its inventors, the highest in the country, far outstrip those prescribed by the Act.