Server to Table
With technology underpinning much of the work the CIP does around the world, Guvener discusses how that has impacted legal.
CIP is a research organisation conducting agricultural research for development in 22 countries, mainly in the global South – this means we are very much involved with the development of intellectual property. Sustainability in agriculture is a key priority for our organisation. We have reached six million households in sub-Saharan Africa with our sweet potato technologies: we distribute genetic resources so other entities can use them in developing new solutions.
We are very much a capitaliser of technological innovation in terms of agriculture. That is exactly how I see our legal department. We are a service-oriented group of lawyers using technology to support colleagues around the world to be aware of the regulatory elements that they need to be taking into consideration for the implementation of their projects. This is so they can plan, and so that nothing becomes a bottleneck. We organise our portfolio management through a system called OCS – it’s based on ‘Agresso’. This is where we try to automate as much as possible: in terms of creating reports, creating networks for contractual management, and timesheets. An important aspect of our work is supporting the innovation pipeline. We have contracted an external software service provider for management of our IP platform, which covers all IP management processes, from invention disclosure all the way up to licensing. As soon as our colleagues have a brilliant idea, we encourage them to disclose it internally. This triggers a review process, supported by both our legal and finance teams. Then, with approval from assigned leadership, we take all necessary protections, such as intellectual property rights. With our integrated corporate system, we can monitor how we use that technology with different development projects or whether we license it for others to use. We can measure the impact whilst we’re deploying the invention for public benefit. Email almost becomes a burden when you come to the end, with a long exchange of documents from lots of different members of the chain. We work in a decentralised way, so collaborating with Microsoft Teams has been tremendously helpful – it’s fantastic when you’re working across multiple time zones with different people.
