Dubai and Technology

UAE is one country that has experienced one of the biggest economic impacts by passing their Electronic Transactions and Commerce Law in 2002.

Today Dubai is a well-known e-Commerce centre. 70 per cent of government services are offered online in Dubai and even some IT companies in East Africa have moved operations to Dubai.

In 2004 the ruler of Dubai launched the Dubai Outsourced Zone to facilitate e-trading. This is the world's first free zone just dedicated to the outsourcing industry.

Dubai Internet City provides a strategic and cost effective platform for ICT companies and government.

Business licence application forms are processed electronically through the Dubai Internet Site.

Besides just having a world-class technical infrastructure, the Dubai government has backed e-business initiatives to support this vibrant environment.

IT in Kenya

Lack of an electronic communication and e-transaction legislation has hampered growth in the e-Commerce sub sector and also kept numerous potential investors away.

The Kenya Communications Amendment Bill 2007 is rather vague about the issue and does not adequately address electronic transaction or e-commerce issues.

The growth of the Internet and other electronic communications technologies is providing an array of opportunities and benefits for Kenyans especially in the business sector.

e-Commerce enables businesses to harness ICT to overcome distance. Businesses can use e-commerce to increase efficiency, access new markets and respond creatively and effectively to business opportunities and customer needs.

Industry data indicates that e-commerce is conservatively estimated to be worth over $2 trillion and an extraordinary growth is expected in the next few years.

For the Government to boost e-Commerce, it needs to have a strategy that would ensure that the legal and regulatory environment facilitates uptake of e-commerce across the country. This is critical to the future global competitiveness of Kenya and the region as a whole.

European Risk Management Strategy

Achievements to date

Achievements made between 2005 and 2007 are described in the 'Public Status Report on the Implementation of the European Risk Management Strategy'. Some of the achievements have been:

-- Implementing the legal tools for monitoring the safety of medicines and for regulatory actions provided for by revised EU pharmaceutical legislation, with particular emphasis on the systematic implementation of risk management plans;

-- Strengthening the spontaneous reporting scheme through further improvements to implementation of electronic reporting of adverse drug reactions to the EudraVigilance database;

-- Launching the European Network of Centres for Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacovigilance (ENCePP) project to strengthen the monitoring of medicinal products by facilitating the conduct of multi-centre post-authorisation safety studies;

-- Contributing, in collaboration with the European Commission, to the conduct of research in the field of pharmacovigilance and safety of medicines in the context of the Health Theme of the 7th Framework Programme;

-- Strengthening the organisation and the operation of the EU Pharmacovigilance System.

Priority areas for the next two years

Building on the achievements to date, the EMEA and HMA are in the process of finalising a work programme on activities to be undertaken over the next two years to further implement the ERMS. A number of environmental changes will impact on this work programme, such as the European Commission's Strategy to Better Protect Public Health by Strengthening and Rationalising EU Pharmacovigilance. Two main areas will be covered by the ERMS during the next two years: further improving the operation of the EU Pharmacovigilance System and strengthening the science that underpins the safety monitoring of medicines for human use. It is envisaged for this work programme to be published following the November 2007 HMA meeting.

1. In autumn 2002, the Heads of Medicines Agencies (HMA) agreed on the outline of a European Risk Management Strategy (ERMS). A summary report prepared by the HMA Ad Hoc Working Group on ERMS was subsequently published in January 2003 (MCA/PL/JM/HoASummaryReport.doc on http://heads.medagencies.org). The aim of the ERMS is to strengthen the safety monitoring in the EU of medicinal products for human use.

2. The 'Public Status Report on the Implementation of the European Risk Management Strategy' is available on the EMEA website http://www.emea.europa.eu/pdfs/human/phv/16895407en.pdf

3. The final version of the work programme to further implement the ERMS in the next two years will be presented at the November 2007 Heads of Medicines Agency Meeting.

Enterprise Security

Enterprises and end-users are making buying decisions based on vendor innovation. So says the recent IDC study, 'Innovation in the Security Software Market: Top Vendors from a Mindshare Perspective'. This indicates that organizations may be looking for value in their software investments, and not just the price. In general, many companies in the region may come across as being price sensitive, but this survey result suggests that companies may be willing to invest in more expensive software solutions if they see the value of their investments to the business.

The study reports that traditional heavyweights like Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro, IBM, and Microsoft have been perceived by enterprise IT users to be innovative in the area of security software. However, large infrastructure software vendors, who were a part of the IDC survey, indicated that security wasn't their primary focus. This shows that other product lines in the portfolio of the vendor could have influenced the perception of how innovative a vendor's security products are. These players may have the opportunity to leverage their brand equity to leapfrog competitors in the security software business, especially if they are trusted names in the market for other products.

When respondents were asked about the benefits they look for when software vendors innovate, the response that made it to the top 3 list in all 4 countries was 'more value for money as vendors bundle new features in products'.


The top benefits mentioned when software companies innovate for Indian companies include 18% cost savings, 20% fewer integration problems, 5% improved business productivity, and 21% more value for money as vendors build new features in products.

Competitive Gains

With the emergence of new technologies and market players, many companies face the prospect of being outpaced by their competitors. Finding a way to look over the competition's shoulder and interpreting business strategy - and that of the industry as a whole - is critical to success in an ever evolving marketplace. But, you don't have to infiltrate a rival's secretive Research and Development (R&D) practices to get the information you need. In many cases, patent publications provide the only source of insight into a company's R&D initiatives before a product launch occurs. Once this data is converted into competitive business information, Intellectual Property (IP) professionals can uncover trends and anomalies critical to making sound choices. In these instances, patents intelligence is an essential business tool crucial for forecasting and overcoming competitive pressures. The study of patents publications provides an all too often under utilized window into market dynamics.


By assessing various trends, strengths and weaknesses, and more importantly the potential implications of IP rights on the overall business strategy, companies become well positioned to deal with threats and opportunities. One of the most important aspects of competitive intelligence is the opportunity it creates for monitoring emerging technologies. The results may indicate the innovation habits of major conglomerates, smaller niche companies, and academia.

The pace of emerging players, diversification rates of organizations, and the influx of non-core competitors can assist in evaluating changes to "IP market share" to support white space analysis projects prior to entering new markets. Trend analysis can reveal the most viable route to market or when trying to squeeze products into an already crowded space. With a picture of the competitive landscape in-hand, an organization can gauge its chances of success by locating a strategic route between its rivals.

Such detailed knowledge enables a company to make more informed business decisions and align its IP practice with its strategic goals. If its competitors are diversifying into new markets, this raises questions about their own international and technical coverage.

The benefits of competitive intelligence data extends into a company's boardroom, enabling decisions to be made more effectively and precisely. This may allow marketing strategists to gain product positioning insight, or R&D personnel to stay abreast of key innovations. Information available from the interrogation of patent landscapes is versatile and can be used to reveal the following:

o Identification of industry leaders, their trends, and the density of patent rights within a particular field. This assists in assessing freedom to operate, ability to compete, barriers to entry, justification of patent threats, and other critical factors for strategy judgment.
o Merger and acquisition support as well as due diligence of portfolios can benchmark and apportion significance to a target's portfolio. Management can, therefore, become more informed before investing.
o Litigation and licensing support for narrowing and categorizing large quantities of patents, with the ability to filter and drill down to key findings. This helps with risk assessment and commercialization opportunity studies.
o Alignment of IP holdings based on organizational configuration, product lines, or business units provides executives a view of their IP rights mapped in the same fashion as corporate structure.

All these benefits are of significant value and, from experience, we've seen instances where a target's portfolio is close to expiration, the original inventors are no longer employed by the company, and future innovation upon core technologies has dwindled as a result. These findings are often vital in deciding the validity of the merger or acquisition. Similarly, by employing competitive intelligence techniques, companies have been able to identify whether rumors of rival developments are in the process of being realized - creating a level of awareness necessary to cope with ever-changing market dynamics.

As with any type of detailed analysis, staying on top of this information and organizing it into actionable knowledge can be a daunting task without proper patents analytical capabilities. As each technology differs, trends may take years to develop and the identification of them can take just as long to untrained analysts. Auditing patent publications and then gathering a team together to analyze their meaning is difficult and often expensive to justify for even the largest organizations. Even after companies have obtained the published details of their competitors' innovations, the commercial potential and threat level is not always apparent at first glance. A fair amount of analysis and brainstorming from all departments of the organization is required to build a concrete shape of any industry and there are tools available to assist with data extraction, as well as the analytical process. Yet, companies who don't take advantage of these capabilities run the risk of playing catch-up or worse, of being blocked out of the market and reliant upon third party licenses to stay in the game.

By merging IP and business strategy, companies are able to understand how to use competitive information - thereby ensuring that their own developments are in synchronization with external industry developments. Only by identifying market trends and rival innovations will a company be able to refine its future research to ensure success. Ultimately, patents intelligence is a piece of a puzzle. When combined with other forms of competitive knowledge, a comprehensive view of the landscape can be provided and the benefits are often extraordinary.

By Jason Resnick, Patents Expert at CPA

Cipher Launches Pharmaceutical Intelligence Conference Manager

To assist with these efforts, Cipher Systems, North America's largest full service Competitive Intelligence (CI) consultancy, announced today that it has expanded its award-winning software Knowledge.Works with a new module - a Pharmaceutical Conference Manager. The module's workflow is designed to enable an organization's CI department to better manage, track and store important information gained from conference attendance. The new solution provides the ability to quickly create teams, and assign specific roles and intelligence-gathering tasks before a conference.