If you're new to PIPRA, consider reading our first publication in Science Magazine.
PIPRA serves a number of purposes, the most important of which is helping public sector technologies to have an impact on the poor worldwide. We do this by decreasing intellectual property barriers, improving commercialization strategies, and increasing technology transfer. We also help public institutions more broadly by supporting them in getting their technological innovations to those who need it most.
PIPRA helps innovators working to create new applications for agricultural, health, water, and energy technologies in developing countries and helps public sector organizations get their technologies out of the lab and into use. We do this by improving innovators' ability to navigate IPR issues and think strategically about commercialization. PIPRA's core activities include the following:
PIPRA’s founding mandate was to focus on IPR issues, particularly patents, in plant biotechnology for crops in developing countries and minor crops. The early model of PIPRA was a clearinghouse one – patent information from major public sector organizations (mostly US universities) would be gathered, licensing information would be collected. By providing accessible and searchable data on public sector patenting, PIPRA would increase transparency and lower transaction costs – supporting better commercialization of agricultural biotechnology innovations from the public sector. Complementary to the clearinghouse structure, PIPRA also promoted better management of IP among public sector organizations, including education and outreach on humanitarian use licensing and a range of other topics.
Over the years, PIPRA has evolved from its early design to meet the demands of its stakeholders. We now work across a range of technology sectors, providing IPR analysis and commercialization strategy services, delivering public sector research tools, and continuing a wide range of activities in education and outreach.
Much has changed over the decade since PIPRA was first conceived. While perspectives on the use of IPR remain wide-ranging, especially where public sector and developing country interests are at stake, there has been a general movement toward viewing IPR less as a block to innovation and more as a high, but surmountable, transaction cost. Importantly, IPR-related transaction costs have been put into perspective amidst other costs of developing genetically modified crops (including regulatory, technical, marketing, and political issues).
Concurrently, there has been a movement away from on-line marketing and clearinghouses for patents. Many patent aggregator web sites and businesses modeled on promoting on-line licensing of patents have folded during the last decade and we have, collectively, a better appreciation for the complexity of how IPRs are used and licensed.
PIPRA’s growth responded to this changing climate. We moved away from identifying our core function as a patent clearinghouse, and toward a model that provides services and products that we have found are most demanded by our stakeholders. Our products include our pPIPRA plant transformation vector with maximal freedom-to-operate, as well as our educational resources such as the IP Handbook. Our services are now focused on: research and analysis; agreement negotiation and drafting; lab services; and international workshops. And we now work with water, health, and energy as well as agricultural technologies.
We built PIPRA’s business over these years on a model that depends on a strong core analysis and lab staff within PIPRA as well as access to a large international IP attorney network and membership base. We believe this model of leveraging outside professional resources as well as in-depth technical knowledge provides PIPRA with a unique capacity to serve our stakeholders.
From early in our history, it was anticipated that PIPRA would eventually be incorporated as a not-for-profit. In July 2009 PIPRA finally made the move to incorporate. We formed a legal entity called PIPRA Foundation and are now in the process of filing for tax exempt status as a 501(c)3 California-based non-profit. The sponsored research program based at UC Davis will continue to operate in parallel to the PIPRA Foundation, giving us the flexibility to continue responding to growing demand for PIPRA’s services.
PIPRA’s mandate has remained the same – promoting better access to technologies for public sector research, and supporting the public sector in moving its agricultural innovations out of the lab and toward widespread impact. But these changes at PIPRA allow us to better fulfill it – in both developed and developing countries.
Today more than 50 institutions from more than 15 countries around the world are members of PIPRA. Your institution can become part of this community and help to navigate intellectual property for innovation in a more fair and productive manner.
Many of PIPRA’s institutional members have active independent technology transfer programs. PIPRA acts as a resource for these programs, and for scientists that work in the public sector, to facilitate the transfer and adoption of their technologies. PIPRA also provides IP analytical services, lab services, resources for professional best practices in IP management, and connections to an international community.
A growing number of collaborators, including law firms, academic programs, IP management organizations, and policy think-tanks regularly work with PIPRA and its member institutions. These collaborators provide world class services to a diverse client base and view PIPRA’s services and mission to be complementary to their own.
PIPRA’s services and structure are intended to support the missions of its members and it collaborators. Where members have active technology transfer offices or offer IP management services, PIPRA supports them through the provision of complementary, not duplicative, services. PIPRA seeks to engage them in global intellectual property issues important to innovations in agriculture, health, water, and energy.
PIPRA membership is open to any university, public agency, or non-profit research institution actively engaged in research. Member institutions must support PIPRA's mission and agree to the terms laid out in the PIPRA Memorandum of Understanding.
There is no PIPRA membership fee. Membership does not prescribe particular IP management practices. Nor does it preclude a research institution from securing external IP management services. PIPRA members retain full ownership and responsibility for their institution’s intellectual property. PIPRA offers services to public sector organizations that often face resource and capacity constraints that can inhibit their ability to get innovations to those who need them.
It is easy to become a PIPRA member. Simply, an authorized official of your institution needs to sign the PIPRA Memorandum of Understanding and return it to PIPRA.
For more information, a Prospective Member Information Pack is available upon request.
In addition, someone from PIPRA’s professional staff would be happy to talk with you about membership in the organization. Depending upon travel schedules, it may even be possible for one of us to visit your institution, provide a seminar, and meet with the relevant constituencies who want to learn more.
AsiaPacific
Europe &Africa
theAmericas
Center for Intellectual Property Studies (CIP)- Göteborg University and Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden
Franklin Pierce Law Center, New Hampshire
Washington University School of Law, St. Louis, Missouri, USA
African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), Nairobi, Kenya
Plant Bioscience Limited (PBL), Norwich, United Kingdom
USAID Farmer-to-Farmer Program-Latin America, Washington, DC
Townsend and Townsend and Crew, LLP
Public Interest Intellectual Property Advisors (PIIPA)
Alan B Bennett, Executive Director
Dr. Bennett's research interests are in the developmental control of cell wall assembly and disassembly, carbohydrate metabolism and fruit development. Bennett has published over 120 research papers in leading scientific journals and is a regular speaker at Universities, international symposia and private companies. He also holds several utility patents related to crop quality traits and consults widely on scientific and intellectual property issues in agricultural biotechnology. Bennett earned a B.Sc. degree at the University of California Davis in 1977 and Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1983, both in the field of plant biology. Upon completing postdoctoral research at Cornell, he returned to UC Davis to teach and conduct research in plant molecular biology. Bennett also held a visiting appointment at the Ecole Nationale Superieure Agronomique d' Toulouse in 1997 and belongs to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society of Plant Biology, the Association of University Technology Managers and the Licensing Executives Society. Dr. Bennett is the executive director of the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture, PIPRA, and Professor in the Dpt. of Plant Sciences at the Univ. California Davis.
Sara Boettiger, Director, Strategic Planning and Development
Sara Boettiger is an agricultural economist with a background in intellectual property law. She works as Director of Strategic Planning and Development at PIPRA and is a consultant for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She publishes in the field of IP law and policy and serves on the Board of Trustees of CIMMYT (The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre) and on the Board of Directors for the Institute of Forest Biotechnology.
Her professional interests are focused on the design and implementation of practical services to support innovation and improve livelihoods in developing countries. Her research interests are in the law and economics of: IP rights and developing countries; collaborative innovation systems; open source in copyright and patents; university technology transfer systems; and the strategic use of all forms of intellectual property to serve the interests of developing countries.
Sara holds a B.A., University of Arizona; M.S., University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Berkeley Sara can be reached at sara@pipra.org.
Cecilia Chi-Ham, Director Biotechnology Resources
Dr. Cecilia Chi-Ham, a native of Honduras, Central America, earned a B.Sc. degree in Chemistry and Environmental Sciences at the University of the Ozarks, USA and a Ph.D. in Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Southern Mississippi, USA. In 2004, upon completing postdoctoral work at Michigan State University in the field of plant biology, Dr. Chi-Ham joined PIPRA. As a plant biologist interested in facilitating agricultural innovations, particularly in developing countries, Dr. Chi-Ham leads PIPRA’s Biotechnology Resources Program. The Biotechnology Resources program’s activities include developing research tools with maximum freedom-to-operate to support a wide array of agricultural applications for humanitarian and commercial purposes, facilitating technology transfer, building new partnerships and research collaborations, and providing legal information on biotechnology tools. The program’s multi-disciplinary activities straddle the delicate junction between science, legal, business development, and regulatory affairs necessary for the research and development of new agricultural innovations in developed and developing countries. Cecilia can be reached at clchiham@ucdavis.edu.
Kyle Jensen, Director Information and Analysis
Kyle is the Director of Information and Analysis at PIPRA
and a research affiliate at the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program. He is also a co–founder of Agrivida Inc., an agricultural biotechnology company creating novel corn varieties for producing fuel ethanol. Kyle served as Vice President of Agrivida from 2002-2006. He is published widely in the field of biotechnology including publications in both Nature and Science. He has a Ph.D. from MIT and B.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, both in chemical engineering.
PIPRA is governed by an Executive Committee made up of individuals nominated and elected from amongst its member institutions.
Gerard Barry
Golden Rice Network Coordinator
International Rice Research Institute, Philippines
John Byatt
Associate Director, Life Sciences
University of Florida
Robert Goodman
Dean of Cook College
Agriculture and Natural Resources
Rutgers University
Keith Jones
Director
Intellectual Property Administration
Washington State University
Charles Kitima
Vice Chancellor
St Augustine Universtiy of Tanzania
Alan McHughen
Biotechnology Specialist
University of California, Riverside
Irvin Mettler
Senior Licensing Officer
Office of Technology Licensing
University of California, Berkeley
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