Secrecy among firms hampering innovation

ILLUSTRATION | NATION A World Bank study says Kenyan firms are falling behind because they keep their innovations secret.

What you need to know:

  • Kenyan business owners are using secrecy as a way of protecting their business ideas and models as opposed to having them patented, something researchers say is hampering alliances and creativity.
  • Victor Nzomo, a lawyer and intellectual property specialist, thinks the agency that administers intellectual property rights—the Kenya Industrial Property Institute—has done little to educate Kenyans how their systems work.

A World Bank study says Kenyan firms are falling behind because they keep their innovations secret.

According to the preliminary findings of the ongoing study, Kenyan business owners are using secrecy as a way of protecting their business ideas and models as opposed to having them patented, something researchers say is hampering alliances and creativity.

Lead researcher Pedro Mendi of Innovation Economics at the University of Navarra in Spain, who presented the findings at a meeting organised by the UN Conference on Trade and Development in Switzerland last month, said he had found that Kenyan firms “rarely” use intellectual property (IP) law to protect their ideas, and that patents were “almost non-existent”.

Mr Mendi presented the World Bank’s Kenya Innovation Survey based on research conducted jointly with Robert Mudida of the Strathmore Business School in Nairobi, at the Investment, Innovation and Entrepreneurship for Productive Capacity-building and Sustainable Development event in Geneva.

“The effect of these trade secrets is that you very rarely collaborate,” Mr Mendi said. “Firms don’t talk much to universities, meaning collaborative research between firms and universities is hampered.”

This, he explained may be partly because firms believe patents will be hard to enforce and partly because some of their innovations — for example, new ways of working in the services industry — may be hard to describe concretely and hence hard to patent.

Victor Nzomo, a lawyer and intellectual property specialist, thinks the agency that administers intellectual property rights—the Kenya Industrial Property Institute—has done little to educate Kenyans how their systems work.

Mr Mendi’s study explores policy environment and the current trends in policy tools, and how they can be applied to strengthen technological and innovation capacity of developing countries.