Kenya embarks on exercise to protect Intellectual Property - will this help our jeune entrepreneurs?

The penny has finally dropped. After the country's huge loss of  revenue due to Japanese patenting of Kenya's traditional 'kiondo' and the near loss of the traditional 'kikoy' patent to a shrewd Kenyan living in the UK, the Kenya Intellectual Property Institute (KIPI) has now embarked on a process to take stock of traditional knowledge and artifacts and determine those that need protection through patent.

What is most exhilarating to me is the growing awareness of the value of IP.

It was quite exciting to read about this in the paper today and then sit with a young developer to discuss patenting of the process his code uses to access and display live stock market data on a mobile phone. An app that might end up revolutionizing the way in which Kenyans track their stock portfolios and help stockholders catch fraudulent brokers who don't execute orders on time or even worse those who trade on stocks without authority from the stockholder.

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