The Influence of Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement on Multinational Companies’ Decision to Invest in East Africa
Abstract
The objective of this study was to determine the influence of Intellectual Property Rights enforcement on Multinational companies' decisions to invest in East Africa. The respondents were made up of public relations officers or officers in charge of corporate governance in respective MNCs.
The study found that respondents were aware of the intellectual property rights enforcement. The key meaning of intellectual property rights were; protecting one’s ideas from being stolen or exploited commercially, allowing the creator or owner to benefit from his or her own work or investment and providing incentives to individuals by offering them recognition for their creativity and material reward for their market inventions. The study further found out that multinational firms had experienced infringement of intellectual property rights in the form of copying, piracy and internet based infringements.
Discriminant model was developed and then tested for accuracy in obtaining predictions. One major finding of the study is that all the discriminate variables were significant in the model (showing a clear difference of the mean values between the two categories). The study further demonstrated that the two groups were heterogeneous ; meaning that Copy Rights, Patents, Trademarks and Trade Secrets could be used to group multinational firms as either having considered intellectual property rights when making investment decision in East Africa or not. This is demonstrated by the hit rate of 94.1% (percentage of correctly classified cases). The usage of the model developed for discrimination is therefore recommended for use since it will classify 94.1% of the cases correctly.
Publisher
University Of Nairobi
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United StatesUsage Rights
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/Collections
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