Amman — The most dangerous thing that can happen in the knowledge economy is not for an idea to fail, but for it to succeed in someone else’s hands.
This is not a passing paradox in the digital landscape. It is one of the most sensitive issues in an economy where the meaning of value is changing faster than laws, markets and societies can sometimes keep pace. Artificial intelligence has shortened the distance between an idea and its implementation, reducing the time required to produce content, designs, software and digital solutions from days or weeks to minutes or hours. At the same time, ideas themselves have become more vulnerable to copying, reproduction and circulation outside the control of their creators. Between the speed of innovation and the right to own it lies one of the most important battles of today’s digital economy.
Intellectual property is therefore no longer a legal issue separate from economic activity. It has become part of the new economic structure. Protecting an idea means protecting the possibility of turning it into a company, a license, an investment, a job, a product and a market. When knowledge is protected, its owner can build upon it rather than remain vulnerable to those with faster access to the means of copying or exploiting it.
Global indicators clearly demonstrate the scale of this transformation. The number of published patent families related to generative AI rose from around 14,000 in 2023 to 37,808 last year. Meanwhile, more than 56,000 patent families were published collectively in 2024 and 2025, exceeding the total published throughout the previous decade, which stood at 54,358 families. Generative AI patent families also accounted for 8.7% of all AI patent families, compared with 6.1% in 2023.
Behind these figures, a new economic landscape is taking shape. Competition is no longer simply about using technology, but about owning the technologies and knowledge that will create value in the next phase. Every protected innovation carries economic potential that extends beyond its creator to a wider ecosystem of employees, startups, suppliers, investors, jobs and new markets.
Intellectual property thus becomes a tool for serving society and empowering individuals. A young person who learns AI and uses its tools possesses a skill. But a young person who uses those tools to create a model, software, content or design, and then knows how to document, protect, license and commercialize it, possesses something entirely different: a knowledge asset that can become a sustainable source of income. The difference does not become apparent in the training room; it emerges when a skill enters the market and begins generating real economic returns.
Jordan has the foundations needed to build on this equation. Its ranking in the Global Innovation Index improved from 73rd in 2024 to 65th last year, advancing eight places in a single year and continuing an upward trajectory that has placed Jordan among the economies making the fastest progress in the index since 2019. At the same time, Jordan recorded 21 patent applications by country of origin in 2023, according to World Intellectual Property Organization data, ranking 104th globally on this indicator. This gap reveals significant room to strengthen the conversion of knowledge, research and innovation into intellectual property assets that can be protected and economically utilized.
This is precisely the space that new digital talent should target. Training that ends with acquiring a skill adds an employee to the labor market. But training that takes innovation through protection, financing, marketing and licensing creates an entrepreneur, a new source of income and an opportunity capable of expanding and reaching export markets. In this sense, intellectual property becomes a natural extension of youth empowerment policies rather than a legal step that comes after innovation has been completed.
In Jordan, this takes on greater significance as national interest in youth, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship expands. This has been reflected in efforts to connect support for young talent with the development of an ecosystem more closely linked to the digital economy, including direct attention to intellectual property at the level of young leadership. Crown Prince Hussein bin Abdullah II met with the Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Davos, with discussions focusing on the partnership between Jordan and the organization and support for its programs in the Kingdom, particularly those related to youth, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Yet the picture is incomplete without considering the other side. The same artificial intelligence that has given innovators enormous productive capabilities has also made copying and reproduction faster than ever. An image can be reproduced, a design imitated, text used outside its original context, data incorporated into training systems, and an innovation stripped of its uniqueness before its creator has even secured the relevant rights. As the digital environment expands, protecting the original source becomes increasingly complex, making the need for a rights system capable of keeping pace with technology more urgent.
Global figures show that intellectual property infringement is no longer a marginal phenomenon. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) estimated the value of global trade in counterfeit and pirated goods at around $467 billion in 2021, equivalent to 2.3% of total global imports. This estimate does not include counterfeit goods produced and consumed domestically or pirated digital content, meaning the actual scale of the illicit economy associated with intellectual property infringement could be significantly larger.
The theft of innovation does not only harm the creator. It undermines confidence in investment, reduces incentives for research and development, and deprives markets of value that could have expanded and generated new income and opportunities. In the digital economy in particular, the theft of a single idea can lead to widespread reproduction, making its impact far greater than the boundaries of individual harm.
Protecting intellectual property has therefore become part of countries’ competitiveness, part of the fairness of the digital economy and part of the future of the talent being developed today. The approach that connects youth with innovation, innovation with ownership, and ownership with the economy is the approach that gives digital transformation its true meaning.
Artificial intelligence can multiply humanity’s ability to create knowledge, but it cannot by itself guarantee that this knowledge remains with its creator. This is where the responsibility of governments, societies and institutions begins: to make protecting an idea a means of protecting people, to make empowering innovators an investment in the economy, and to make intellectual property a bridge between an innovative mind and a future worthy of being built under the names of those who create it.
This is at the heart of the path Jordan is pursuing as it places the energy of its youth, its innovation and its digital economy within a unified vision focused clearly on the future, reflected in Crown Prince Hussein bin Abdullah II’s engagement with youth, technology, innovation and intellectual property.
The writer is a smart cities and digital economy developer.
Source: Al-Ghad
