US can help move developing countries policies towards innovation through WIPO.

Many policymakers, especially those in developing countries, need to move toward an economic framework that focuses and elevates innovation policy and discards the traditional framing of intellectual property as a bargaining chip that countries should hold onto for trade negotiations with developed countries. This traditional (zero-sum) framing of intellectual property misses the point that IP is one part of a broader policy framework that is needed (along with institutional capacity, education, infrastructure, etc.) to support innovation and productivity growth. In fact, countries should make improving their intellectual property rules, enforcement, and administration separate from trade agreements part of their own economic policy reforms, simply because doing so would help their own economy and so should be part of countries’.

The target audiences for renewed engagement on an updated framing of intellectual property, trade, and innovation are many and varied—representing in many ways a mirror image of the typology of groups that oppose stronger IP outlined earlier. The United States and likeminded countries should develop a tailored strategy to identify stakeholders to engage as part of the effort to reframe the debate around IP, trade, and innovation, as the target audience in each country is not clearly bifurcated, both within and between developed and developing countries. Even within developing countries that have traditionally pushed for weak or no intellectual property protections, such as China, India, and South Africa, there are stakeholders—individual policymakers, academics, government agencies, trade associations, and research institutions—that recognize both the need to focus on innovation and that IP plays a key supporting role. For example, there can exist government agencies in developing countries that recognize that IP is a critical enabler of innovation, despite the country’s formal antagonistic position toward IP in international debates, such as between ministries of science and technology on one side and ministries of industry or health on the other. There can also be cleavages between the positions held by a country’s representatives at WTO, WIPO, and UNCTAD and officials from the respective agencies that actually work on economic policy, science and technology, and intellectual property back in the country’s capital. Supporters of a robust IP system need to work to strengthen these voices.