Tag: patent

From the Corner Café to the Global Market: Building an Inclusive Intellectual Property System Across APEC

[from APEC News, by María Gloria Riethmüller Harland, Singapore]

Every day, I pass by small businesses that bring life to our neighborhoods. A corner café with its own blend, a family bakery known for its special recipe, a local designer selling clothes under her own brand. Few of them would think of themselves as intellectual property owners, yet in many ways they are.

Their innovative brands, recipes and ideas are often their most valuable assets. But for most small businesses, intellectual property still feels like something meant for large companies with legal teams.

Over the last two years of chairing the APEC Intellectual Property Rights Experts’ Group (IPEG), one conviction has only grown stronger. Intellectual property should not be a privilege for a few. It should be the foundation that lets anyone with a good idea earn from its expression and grow. It should spark more creativity across our region. It should help build new businesses, new jobs and shared prosperity.

In practice, for a small business owner, the system can feel complex, costly and hard to navigate. The landscape is also changing quickly, as new technologies and online trade reshape how ideas are made, shared and protected.

When IPEG was created in 1997, its focus was making global trade rules on intellectual property work between economies. Over time, its work has grown to place small businesses, along with women, young innovators and local communities, at the center.

Our work over the past two years has been about making that shift real.

Small businesses, big ideas

Micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) account for more than 97 percent of businesses in the APEC region. The challenge is not whether they have valuable ideas, they do. The challenge is turning those ideas into growth.

Intellectual property can help small businesses protect what makes them different, secure finance and expand into new markets with confidence.

The difference can be striking. A study [archived PDF] by IP Australia found that new small businesses that filed for intellectual property in their first year were twice as likely to achieve strong sales and employment growth. Yet the study found that only a small fraction of MSMEs own intellectual property.

That is why small businesses sit at the heart of IPEG’s 2025-2026 Work Plan.

Some of the most valuable lessons came from simply listening. Last year August in Incheon, I moderated our Policy Dialogue on Intellectual Property for Business, with a focus on SMEs. Our conversations were honest and practical, from making the system more user-friendly for small business owners to the opportunities e-commerce opens for them.

Conversations matter, but only if they lead to change. This one did. Following the dialogue, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) offered member economies the opportunity to embark on a project, asking small businesses directly how they understand, use and perceive intellectual property, and what stands in their way. Such projects aim to help offices and policymakers across the region build systems and support around real needs, not assumptions.

When we met in Dalian this August, the progress was clear. Some economies shared how they are running training workshops that help firms, especially technology startups, identify and actively manage their intellectual property strategically. Others are offering support in valuing patents, so small businesses can use their inventions to secure loans.

Step by step, intellectual property is becoming a tool small business owners and innovators can actually use, not just one they hear about.

Keeping pace with technology

Technology is changing how ideas come to a reality and are sold. But it is also changing how we protect those inventions, giving intellectual property offices new tools to work faster, smarter while making systems simpler for business owners.

Take patents, which protect new inventions. To get one, an inventor has to prove their idea is genuinely new. With a record 3.7 million patent applications filed worldwide in 2024, that is no small task.

Artificial intelligence search tools can now help compare applications more thoroughly rather than simple keyword matches. Chatbots walk first-time applicants through the search process. New translation tools make it simpler to understand patents filed across the region.

For a small business, this is far from a technical detail. Faster and more accurate searches mean knowing early whether an idea is genuinely new, before spending money on an application and investing in their venture.

Used well, technology can turn a complex process into a quicker, clearer path to protection.

Every idea counts

But a system is only as strong as the people it reaches.

Women, for example, accounted for just 18 percent [archived PDF] of inventors named in international patent applications in 2024. For the people and communities behind unprotected good inventions, that means missed income, missed recognition and missed growth.

Changing that takes partnership. By enhancing dialogue with APEC’s Policy Partnership on Women and the Economy, IPEG can build women entrepreneurs’ know-how on using intellectual property to protect their brands and designs, helping them to grow internationally.

Every region also has its own valuable cultural or geographical assets, while communities also carry traditions passed down over generations, from recipes and crafts to songs and stories. They are not just part of communities’ heritage and pride. For many, these traditions and assets can become sources of income. Intellectual property plays a vital role here too.

Geographical indications, labels that tie a product’s name to its place of origin, are one way to do that. Across the region, they are helping more small local businesses and women-led enterprises stand out from imitations, reach new buyers and become more competitive.

Copyright is reaching folk art too, from traditional stories to music and designs. Clear rights give communities the confidence to share their traditions widely and give new generations a reason to keep creating with them.

Inclusion is not a side project for intellectual property. It is the test of whether the system works at all. When intellectual property reaches more people, more creations reach the world, benefiting workers, MSMEs, communities and consumers. That simple belief has guided IPEG’s work for the past two years.

In August, I chaired my final IPEG meeting in Dalian. What I value most is not any single outcome, but the spirit behind our work.

IPEG is a space for dialogue. A space to ensure intellectual property drives resilience, innovation and growth. A space where economies with different experiences work together to make intellectual property more meaningful and accessible.

That space matters more than ever. New technologies, new business models and new forms of creativity are creating both opportunities and challenges. I encourage IPEG to keep using this forum not only to exchange information, but to thinking creatively about where APEC cooperation can make more tangible differences.

Because in the end, the measure of our work is simple. It is whether the corner café, the family bakery and the young designer down the street can turn their innovations into a lasting livelihood.

María Gloria Riethmüller is the Chair of the APEC Intellectual Property Rights Experts’ Group (IPEG) and Legal Advisor at the Intellectual Property Department of Chile’s Undersecretariat of International Economic Affairs.

Economics-Watching: How Green Innovation Can Stimulate Economies and Curb Emissions

[from IMF Blog, by Zeina Hasna, Florence Jaumotte & Samuel Pienknagura]

Coordinated climate policies can spur innovation in low-carbon technologies and help them spread to emerging markets and developing economies

Making low-carbon technologies cheaper and more widely available is crucial to reducing harmful emissions.

We have seen decades of progress in green innovation for mitigation and adaptation: from electric cars and clean hydrogen to renewable energy and battery storage.

More recently though, momentum in green innovation has slowed. And promising technologies aren’t spreading fast enough to lower-income countries, where they can be especially helpful to curbing emissions. Green innovation peaked at 10 percent of total patent filings in 2010 and has experienced a mild decline since. The slowdown reflects various factors, including hydraulic fracking that has lowered the price of oil and technological maturity in some initial technologies such as renewables, which slows the pace of innovation.

The slower momentum is concerning because, as we show in a new staff discussion note, green innovation is not only good for containing climate change, but for stimulating economic growth too. As the world confronts one of the weakest five-year growth outlooks in more than three decades, those dual benefits are particularly appealing. They ease concerns about the costs of pursuing more ambitious climate plans. And when countries act jointly on climate, we can speed up low-carbon innovation and its transfer to emerging markets and developing economies.

IMF research [archived PDF] shows that doubling green patent filings can boost gross domestic product by 1.7 percent after five years compared with a baseline scenario. And that’s under our most conservative estimate—other estimates show up to four times the effect.

The economic benefits of green innovation mostly flow through increased investment in the first few years. Over time, further growth benefits come from cheaper energy and production processes that are more energy efficient. Most importantly, they come from less global warming and less frequent (and less costly) climate disasters.

Green innovation is associated with more innovation overall, not just a substitution of green technologies for other kinds. This may be because green technologies often require complementary innovation. More innovation usually means more economic growth.

A key question is how countries can better foster green innovation and its deployment. We highlight how domestic and global climate policies spur green innovation. For example, a big increase in the number of climate policies tends to boost green patent filings, our preferred proxy for green innovation, by 10 percent within five years.

Some of the most effective policies to stimulate green innovation include emissions-trading schemes that cap emissions, feed-in-tariffs, which guarantee a minimum price for renewable energy producers, and government spending, such as subsidies for research and development. What’s more, global climate policies result in much larger increases in green innovation than domestic initiatives alone. International pacts like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement amplify the impact of domestic policies on green innovation.

One reason policy synchronization has a prominent impact on domestic green innovation is what is called the market size effect. There’s more incentive to develop low-carbon technologies if innovators can expect to sell into a much larger potential market, that is, in countries which adopted similar climate policies.

Another is that climate policies in other countries generate green innovations and knowledge that can be used in the domestic economy. This is known as technology diffusion. Finally, synchronized policy action and international climate commitments create more certainty around domestic climate policies, as they boost people’s confidence in governments’ commitment to addressing climate change.

Climate policies even help spread the use of low-carbon technologies in countries that are not sources of innovation, through trade and foreign-direct investment. Countries that introduce climate policies see more imports of low-carbon technologies and higher green FDI inflows, especially in emerging markets and developing economies.

Risks of protectionism

Lowering tariffs on low-carbon technologies can further enhance trade and FDI in green technologies. This is especially important for middle- and low-income countries where such tariffs remain high. On the flipside, more protectionist measures would impede the broader spread of low-carbon technologies.

In addition, and given evidence of economies of scale, protectionism—with ultimately smaller potential markets—could stifle incentives for green innovation and lead to duplication of efforts across countries.

The risks of protectionism are exacerbated when climate policies, such as subsidies, do not abide by international rules. For example, local content requirements, whereby only locally produced green goods benefit from subsidies, undermine trust in multilateral trade rules and could result in retaliatory measures.

Beyond embracing a rules-based approach to climate policies, the advanced economies, where most green innovation occurs, have an important responsibility: sharing the technology so that emerging and developing economies can get there faster. Such direct technology transfers hold the promise of a double dividend for emerging markets and developing economies—reducing emissions and yielding economic benefits.

—This blog reflects research by Zeina Hasna, Florence Jaumotte, Jaden Kim, Samuel Pienknagura and Gregor Schwerhoff.

Novels as a Kind of University Demonstrating Storms of Global Finance and Technification

Edith Wharton began writing The Age of Innocence in 1917 as a way of recalling and criticizing the world of her youth, which had not yet experienced the devastation of World War I (1914–18).  Beginning in July 1920, the novel was published in serial form in New York’s monthly Pictorial Review.

The centrality of finance and technical change can be seen. We are reminded of the very first line in The Magnifcent Ambersons of Booth Tarkington, which tells the reader that the basis of the magnificence of the Ambersons was established when they somehow benefited from the 1873 financial crisis which destroyed many others. (Whether the Ambersons were shrewd or lucky or wily is not clarified.)

The Age of Innocence is set in New York in the 1870s and the financial storm and “techno-storm” become vital:

The Panic of 1873:

In The Age of Innocence, the investment bank run by Julius Beaufort collapses, bringing shame upon him and his wife and throwing New York into a tizzy. Beaufort’s business failure is a fictionalized version of the Panic of 1873, industrial capitalism’s first worldwide depression. Then, the United States backed its currency with both silver and gold, but when Germany and several other countries stopped using silver to back their currency, the price of silver fell precipitously, devaluing U.S. currency. The U.S. Treasury made matters worse by releasing large amounts of paper money into the economy. Speculators and bankers now had to immediately pay off their debts with gold.

In 1873, a prominent investment banker by the name of Jay Cooke went bankrupt, the effects rippled throughout the entire U.S. economy, and panic ensued. Trading was suspended for two weeks on the New York Stock Exchange as company after company failed, wages dropped precipitously, and unemployment spiked. The rise of the labor movement can be traced to the widespread unrest and economic instability set off by the panic. Additionally, the panic allowed a few of the wealthiest businessmen—such as Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, and Cyrus McCormick, who retained access to valuable capital—to vastly increase their wealth and snuff out competitors.

Technological Advancements

Characters in The Age of Innocence are aware their world is about to be forever changed by the culture of outsiders, brought to them in part by advancements in technology. Although inventions like the telephone were on the horizon, they seemed improbably fantastic to people living in the early 1870s world of telegrams and horse-drawn carriages. However, in the final chapter, Wharton depicts Newland Archer living in a world that has been significantly altered by these technologies, a mere quarter century later.

In 1876, for example, American inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) patented an early telephone and wowed audiences by demonstrating the world’s first telephone call by placing a call from one telegraph station to another five miles away.  The Western Union company refused to buy Bell’s telephone patent, claiming his invention would amount to no more than a novelty. However, the first telephone line was built in 1877-78, and after that, telephone usage skyrocketed.  At the start of the 1880s, there were almost 50,000 telephones in use, a number that swelled to over half a million by the turn of the century.

A similar large-scale change was the invention and development of electricity. Although the first electric light was developed in 1835, it was not until 1879 that American inventor Thomas Edison (1847-1931) developed and patented a light bulb with a life span of 15 hours. Edison’s work also focused on the problems of electrical generation and conductivity.

At the same time that communication was becoming easier and the day was lengthened artificially through electric lighting, the distance between continents was shortened by advances in turbine steam engines. 

In the 1860s, it took between eight and nine days to cross the Atlantic Ocean; by 1907, the Mauretania (the ship that Dallas and Newland Archer take to Europe in the last chapter) makes the voyage in half that time.  This was a contributing factor to the great influx of European immigrants who arrived in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Chapter 29, Newland contemplates the “brotherhood of visionaries,” who predict a train tunnel under the Hudson River as well as “ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days … and other Arabian Night marvels.” In 1904, excavation for train tunnels under the Hudson began, directed by Alexander Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1910, New York’s Penn Station opened and began receiving traffic from electric trains that traveled through the tunnels.

Notice that the novel The Magnificent Ambersons is from 1918, Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence from 1920. In each, the personal storms of private emotion are somewhat carried along and swept up into the storms coming from national and even global finance (1873 caused a tremendous crash in Germany and Austria called the “Grunderkrach” [founder’s crash]) as well as techno-waves that are very baffling to the people of the time.