Today the World Celebrates Human Creativity – it is the World Intellectual Property Day
26.04.2021 – Author: Magda Popescu
Today the world celebrates human creativity – it is the World Intellectual Property Day.
Creation is, for sure, morally rewarding. It gives room to express oneself. It gives peace of mind. It unveils the deepest abyss of the soul.
We love reading, listening to music, looking at a painting, or putting on a spectacular dress.
But it is so much more than this – it is the drive of our society’s progress and economic growth, it is a tool for overcoming great distances, of all sorts, it is the engine behind expanding our life span and improving the quality of what goes on during the said span.
It is the most important source of wealth. Gone are the times when resources such as land and workforce were driving growth. Now it is the time when innovation can bring a business from nickels to billions in a couple of years. And there are some very exciting stories that we could read about in the last week mass-media publications.
But it is also a time of reflection. Let us take a break and look at where innovation is now coming from – the published statistics by World Intellectual Property Office (https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo_pub_943_2020.pdf) show that innovation protected by intellectual property registrations is coming from other geographies. An estimated 14.9 million patents were in force worldwide in 2019. More than half are from three countries only – the United States of America (3.1 million), China (2.7 million) and Japan (2.1 million).
Europe must take note and look more into properly stimulating and protecting innovation. Innovation turned into (intellectual) property is a self-feeding engine – when protected and acknowledged, innovation brings rewards and resources to its creators and investors, thus further stimulating future innovation.
We finish this short plea with a plastic image from a funny intellectual property object – the novel “A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court”. Mark Twain put in one line the spirit that drove the US of the 19th century from a new born nation into the fastest growing economy: “A country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab and can’t travel anyway but sideways and backways.”
Happy IP Day to those generating innovation and those dedicated to protecting it!
