Suburban
THE African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) last week hosted a two-day workshop on the importance of innovation and its capacity to boost economies including role that intellectual property rights play as the backbone of innovation for businesses or individuals to reap full benefits of their inventions.
Peter Tanyanyiwa Suburban Reporter
The workshop was held at the ARIPO headquarters along Natal Road in Belgravia and ran from April 27 to 28 2022.
Organised by ARIPO in collaboration with African Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation Project (AfrIPI), the workshop was aimed at raising awareness, provide training and promoting 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.”
Participants at the workshop follow proceedings.
ARIPO head of political sections at the European Union delegation in Zimbabwe, Mrs Lourdes Chamorro, 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, trademarks, copyrights, designs, and utility models, whilst on the other hand, customers can rest assured that what they purchase is legitimate and secure,” she 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.”
She 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,” said Mrs Chamorro.
At the two-day workshop delegates discussed 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.
