World Intellectual Property Day offers a unique opportunity to join with others around the globe to consider how intellectual property (IP) helps the global arts scene to flourish and enables the technological innovation that drives human progress. The campaign is also an opportunity to highlight the role that IP rights, such as, patents, trademarks, industrial designs, copyright, play in encouraging innovation and creativity.

World IP Day emphasizes the importance of a balanced IP system to recognize and reward inventors and creators for their work and ensure that society benefits from their creativity and ingenuity. IP rights enable researchers, inventors, businesses, designers, artists and others to legally protect their innovative and creative outputs and secure an economic return from them.

To build our common future and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we need to re-think how we live, work and play. World IP Day 2024 is an opportunity to explore how intellectual property (IP) encourages and can amplify the innovative and creative solutions that are so crucial to building our common future.

The SDGs are a blueprint for people, peace, prosperity and our planet. Just as the challenges we face are multi-faceted and complex, the 17 SDGs are interdependent, with action in one area affecting outcomes in others. This is why development efforts must balance social, economic and environmental sustainability. The challenges we face are deep-seated and complex. We need to act now and we need to use all the tools available to us, especially our ingenuity and intellectual property to achieve a sustainable future for everyone, everywhere.

Find out how intellectual property fosters the innovation and creativity we need to drive human progress, and connect IP to the SDGs to make the world a better place.

WIPO