Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation: Implications for Added Value Creation in Africa

This paper analyses mainly the type of relation existing between intellectual property rights (IPR), innovation and added value in six (06) countries of Africa namely Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Kenya, South Africa and Tunisia. The Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach is used. The main results stemming from analyses reveal, among others, that is the effect of IPR on added value and growth remainder ambiguous ; ii) The IPR encourage investment and innovation which causes added value creation ; iv) The use of innovation and the possibility to imitate the innovation constitute the source of added value creation, economic growth and development. The paper recommends at last that it is very important to direct economic policies toward IPR promotion, the development of innovations, the use and imitation of innovations.