Enhance the impact of research on society and build innovative partnerships

Protecting for the sake of sharing 

The IRD has embarked on a new approach to intellectual property and partnership, a strategy designed to serve sustainable development. This strategy seeks to strike the right balance between the free dissemination of knowledge from public research, and the need to protect certain results. The idea is to enable new products or services to be developed while controlling their access. 

The Institute's value-adding initiatives come under the ethical framework of the Nagoya Protocol. As part of this framework, IRD encourages protective measures that bring recognition to local and traditional knowledge in innovation processes, while also steering the holders of this knowledge towards co-ownership of inventions and equitable sharing of results.

The Institute has thus abandoned its former "all patent" approach and streamlined its portfolio, by encouraging the sharing of patents in joint ownership with the Global South.

Ethical public-private partnerships

IRD is strengthening its relationships with innovation ecosystems in the Global South and forging responsible, ethical and sustainable partnerships with the private sectors (companies, NGOs, foundations).

The Institute is also involved in incentives to bring public and private research closer together, such as the Technology Transfer Accelerator Offices (SATT), and competitiveness clusters on priority issues, opening up possibilities for the Global South.

Open science is thus reciprocated by openness to science from society and the economy. This directly benefits populations since, over and above technology transfers, it leads to the co-creation of knowledge, technologies and new services.
IRD is also a founding member of several incubators for innovative companies, including Adecal Technopole in Nouméa and Bond'innov in Bondy. The latter helps leaders of innovative projects - mainly in France and Africa - bring them to fruition, with the aim of facilitating the creation of businesses in the fields of health, biotechnology, the environment and the social and solidarity economy. 

IRD supports multi-actor teams seeking to start projects that show strong potential for development. These might be such things as building a prototype, carrying out prospecting or technical missions, performing marketing research or conducting market analyses.

Examples include:

IRD, MakeSense and Bond'innov have joined forces to create CoLAB, the first multi-actor collaboration laboratory for responsible innovation, seeking solutions that suit local uses and meet local needs. Launched in 2017 in three West African countries (Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Senegal), this project has already brought together over 1,000 participants (researchers, NGOs, social entrepreneurs, public institutes, etc.) to attend collective intelligence workshops and co-build projects addressing the issue of food security. This programme aims to spread to other territories and other issues in the Global South.

Among the CoLAB projects:

Inaugurated in 2016 and hosted by IRD Ile-de-France regional delegation in Bondy, the Innovation Campus (Campus Innovation pour la Planète) is both a physical site and an open space for participatory research, training and experimentation. It is a place for inventing solutions, expressing ideas and developing connections. As part of its strategy to advance collective intelligence, the Campus promotes dialogue between researchers and civil society actors, economic stakeholders and innovators. It provides tools that foment creativity and collaboration in order to stimulate the emergence of projects that meet local needs.

Among the projects developed with these new collaborative approaches are:

> Contact IRD's Innovation and Promotion department