The Role of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in Technology Transfer / Technology Cooperation

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[source: GTZ study RETEX_-_Renewable_Energy_Technology_Exchange, main authors: Hedi Feibel, Fritz Kölling]

Intellectual property is an important factor for innovation and technology cooperation. There is an ongoing discussion about the need of a global policy to accelerate renewable energy technology (RET) innovation and support business, governmental, and humanitarian goals. In the Bali conference (COP 13), article 1 (d) of the final document demands „Effective mechanisms and enhanced means for (…) scaling up of the development and transfer of technology to developing countries Parties in order to promote access to affordable and environmentally sound technologies“. From the perspective of Developing Countries, industrialised countries have to provide the relevant technologies or at least the rights to use them if they want them to join their efforts of combating climate change. In certain cases governments from DC’S could force companies in industrialised countries to provide licences in areas of national security (compulsory licenses), e.g. to combat climate change. For the owner of the licence this could mean wasting large investments in the development of sustainable energy technologies like carbon sequestration, off-shore wind farms and bio fuels. This unclear situation could create barriers for the dissemination of sustainable energy technologies. 

However, neither the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations nor any of their related organizations has developed intellectual property policies on sustainable energy. There are at least three reasons why governments are reluctant to lead the effort to develop a coherent global policy on intellectual property for sustainable energy[1]:

  • No existing precedent for developing such a policy, as intellectual property policies have been developed on a national level or on a one-to-one treaty level
  • Strong interest in withholding information about the economic costs and benefits of patents.
  • Most nations with strong intellectual property policies see patents as an individual right, protected by the rule of law.

While a political framework is still missing, companies have been making use of two different intellectual property concepts: patent pools and open source work.

·      Patent pools are consortiums of companies that band together to allow joint, non-exclusive licensing of intellectual property. They make sense in sustainable energy development because of the large number of organizations attempting to develop similar technologies or products that must work seamlessly together within the existing power infrastructure, in particular important for decentralized generation.

·      The idea of the open source approach is to freely license or release into the public domain the science or technology so that anyone with the skills can modify or add to the core technology. Open source attempts to take advantage of the emerging realisation that "most of the brightest people work somewhere else". The open source model works because many new design ideas are aggregates of several prior designs. As a result, they require expertise from a wide variety of engineering and other disciplines, but without direct monetary reward for participating in the project.

As long as technology exchange is limited to small, decentralized technologies, targeting mainly (poor) Developing Countries, the question of IPRs is not crucial for its success, but it might hinder foreign investments and cooperation with private companies from industrialized countries. For the Least Developing Countries, the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement is still not applied and will become a binding rule only from 2013 on.

Although investments of companies in research and development (R&D) are seen as the main rationale for IPRs other aspects play an important role. Handing out technical drawings without the required assistance on how to use them is of no benefit for the user but might easily put at risk the good reputation of the technology. To ensure a reasonable quality level, trainings and feedback rounds to check the produced quality should be obligatory. Manufacturers using this design should be registered and should give a feedback on how many units they produced and installed at which sites (providing data on site characteristics), and which experiences and modifications regarding the design they made.


[1]     Kevin Closson, How Intellectual Property Policies Can Create Sustainable Energy Infrastructures (2008)

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