This #WorldIPDay we celebrate women-led innovation
Today we celebrate World Intellectual Property (IP) Day and the ground-breaking work of women inventors, creators, and entrepreneurs around the world. While women have been shaping the world through their imagination, ingenuity, and hard work for as long as it has existed, they remain severely underrepresented in the IP arena, accounting for only 16% of inventors named in international patent applications in 2022. On #WorldIPDay, we celebrate women-led innovation and the need to do more to ensure #innovation for all, by all. We also pay tribute to the communities, companies, and countries whose strong and continued support for IP protections enabled the scientific and technological innovations that have allowed us to remain connected, protected, informed, and entertained in the midst of a global pandemic.
At MSD, we use the power of leading-edge science to save and improve lives around the world. This World IP Day, we are especially proud of and grateful to the countless women innovators who, for more than a century, have been instrumental in our research to bring forward medicines, vaccines, and innovative health solutions for the world’s most challenging diseases. Fundamental to our ability to take on this long-term, resource-intensive, high-risk task is an IP-driven innovation policy framework that rewards current successes, incentivizes future discoveries and improvements, and fosters partnerships and collaboration.
However, as multilateral organizations continue to debate the future of IP and some of the world's major economies propose changes to the existing system, there are continuing signs that progress to improve global IP protection is stagnating: the recently released 11th Annual International IP Index found that in 2022, only 33% of the included economies saw a net improvement in their overall score compared with 85% in 2021 and 60% in 2020.
At a time when building economic resilience and reversing the declines in population health due to the pandemic are top priorities, policymakers can and must do more to remove barriers to invention and market access, not create new barriers. They can start by taking stock of their national IP environments and continuing to act individually and through multilateral bodies to stimulate, not stifle, innovation. They can also commit to hastening gender parity among Patent Cooperation Treaty-listed inventors, which at the current rate will not be achieved before 2064 - leaving countless brilliant minds and their ideas untapped.
None of us knows what the future will hold, but we do know that infectious diseases will continue to emerge and evolve, that there will be another pandemic, and that adopting policies that discourage innovation would impede our collective ability to respond to future health emergencies. So today, on World IP Day, let us commit to ensuring the endurance and strengthening of innovation policies and networks that enabled the development of COVID-19 diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines at breakthrough speed, and in doing so, send a strong signal to scientists, designers, and creators about the value of their inventions and the reliability of the global IP system.
Author: Julia Spencer, Associate Vice President, Global Multilateral Engagement, Strategic Alliances, and International Relations, MSD