This book is an outcome of a partnership between the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for
Innovation and Competition and the South Centre, which jointly organized a Global
Forum on Intellectual Property, Access to Medicine and Innovation in Munich on 9–
10 December 2019.
The MPI is more than 50 years old, but it was less than 20 years ago that its
research focus began to change quite fundamentally. In the first decades after its
foundation, the Institute academically supported and accompanied efforts to achieve
a certain standard of protection on the international level. At that time, there was
hardly any consideration of the implications of the intellectual property system for
countries at different levels of technological and economic development.