Ruth Knoblich has been working as a DAAD Lecturer at the South African-German Centre for Development Research at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, since December 2019. She is an associated member and part of the structured PhD programme "International Development Studies" at the Institute for Development Research and Development Policy (IEE) at Ruhr University Bochum, where she was previously employed as a research fellow. Ruth is a research associate in the Intellectual Property Unit of the Law Faculty at the University of Cape Town, where she spent 16 months as an Erasmus Mundus Scholar in 2017/2018.

Ruth Knoblich investigates how countries with advanced technological innovation profiles and highly unequal societies regulate intellectual property rights against the background of their respective innovation systems. The main assumption is that such countries are facing a multitude of sometimes contradictory objectives when it comes to regulating IP, which are potentially driven by three main sources of legitimacy: techno-nationalism, social development and inclusion as well as internationalization. Ruth uses the example of South Africa to examine the extent to which institutional path dependencies and actors' interests impact the complex decision-making setting, thereby contributing to an understanding of the dynamics and development paths of southern innovation systems over time.