Economic Returns on Investment in Intellectual Property by University Lecturers in Nigeria

The paper has identified the rationale and modus operandi for writing of text book, copyright, and patenting by university lecturers with some prescriptions for improving the returns from such investment e.g. avoiding the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, forensic auditing of the creations of ideas in print. As a descriptive research design, it makes use of some indicators for measuring the returns on university lecturers’ investment in print in Nigeria. Data were collected through the use of a validated self-developed questionnaire tagged, Returns on Investment on Intellectual Property Questionnaire (RIIPQ), with a reliability coefficient of r = 0.71. The study covered three Federal and three State universities in South West Nigeria selected through stratification. The participants cut across 300 academic staff of the sampled universities. Data were analyzed through descriptive and inferential statistics tools to test the research hypotheses for the study. The result reveals that there is a significant difference between monetary and non-monetary returns on University Lecturers’ Investment in Intellectual Property in Print and that the copyright acts do not adequately protect the intellectual property of university lecturers in Nigeria. A cull from the findings denotes some recommendations such as strengthening the copy right act to assist in the returns from investment in writing and that appropriate sanctions against erring individuals and institutions drastic reduction of waste and graft adherence to due process on intellectual display and finally the need for moral and ethical rebirth for all and sundry the education industry.