Giving Back
TIP is committed to helping underserved communities around the world improve their understanding, use and management of intellectual property and its alternatives. In order to make this commitment a reality, we carry out projects that foster innovation and creativity in such communities.
Our giving back initiatives concentrate primarily on assisting developing country stakeholders, including indigenous communities. We are particularly interested in building intellectual property capacity in scientific and research communities. In doing so, we work closely with our partners to ensure that their particular needs are met. We conduct our work in partnership with communities, on their terms and on those subjects that they choose.
Our goal is to educate our partnering communities about the relative advantages and disadvantages of pursuing different strategies with the aim of building decision-making capacity that will allow them to make their own choices about how to advance their goals.
TIP’s Giving Back initiatives carried out to date are described below:
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Building Capacity in Innovation Management in Tanzania
TIP experts Barbara Campbell and Tania Bubela traveled to Tanzania for TIP's second Giving Back initiative, co-sponsored by the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH). The initiative involved a number of training initiatives in intellectual property management and technology transfer in the university and institutional research setting.
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Protecting Your Knowledge: Building Intellectual Property Capacity in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, 2009
TIP carried out its first Giving Back initiative in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, which aimed at empowering a group of indigenous people called the Mam People. The goal was to facilitate a discussion about the community’s concerns and goals in relation to medicinal plants and cultural practices in order to identify potential strategies to protect their knowledge and negotiate benefit-sharing agreements.