The Federal Government of Nigeria and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have agreed to actively deepen collaboration to turn the nation’s intellectual property (IP) into tangible financial assets.

The target was to commercialise research from Nigerian universities and support the creative economy through stronger technical cooperation, deeper institutional support, and expanded capacity-building, among others

. This was the outcome of a meeting between the Vice President, Kashim Shettima, a delegation from WIPO led by its Director General, Mr. Daren Tang, and top Nigerian government officials at the Presidential Villa, yesterday.

Categorically, the Vice President drew the WIPO delegation’s attention to Nigeria’s unmistakable ambition, which he said was to build an “intellectual property system that serves the inventor and the investor, the researcher and the entrepreneur, the artiste and the industrialist, the farmer and the software engineer”. He welcomed the decision by WIPO to open its first office in Abuja, the first in Sub-Saharan Africa and one of only seven worldwide.