Get ready for World Intellectual Property Day on April 26. This year's theme, "Intellectual Property and SMEs: bringing ideas to market", focuses on how SMEs can benefit from intellectual property.
Every year on April 26, we celebrate World Intellectual Property Day to highlight the role of intellectual property rights in encouraging innovation and creativity.
Every business starts with an idea. Each of the millions of small and medium-sized businesses that operate around the world every day began with an idea that took shape in someone's mind and went to market.
Ideas, when nourished and enriched by wisdom, know-how and talent, become intellectual property assets that drive business growth, economic recovery, and human progress. Creative minds around the world -- architects, artists, artisans, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, researchers, scientists, and many others -- are generating new ideas every day. From art to artificial intelligence, from fashion to farming, from renewable energy to retail, from television to tourism, from virtual reality to video games, and so on.
Some of their ideas translate into products and services that we want to buy. Other ideas have failed. The journey to market can be treacherous. But by focusing on intellectual property, companies can anticipate, navigate and better manage the many twists and turns that pave the way for commercialisation.
More on Intellectual Property Day
In order to promote widespread awareness of intellectual property rights, the member countries of WIPO chose April 26 in 2000, the date on which the 1970 WIPO Convention came into force, as World Intellectual Property Day.
Since then, IP Day has provided a unique opportunity for people around the world to come together and think about how IP can contribute to the prosperity of music and the arts, drive technological innovation and help change our world.
World Intellectual Property Day Archive:
