Conference calls for more patent commercialization

Shen Changyu, commissioner of the State Intellectual Property Office, speaks with the media at the Patent Information Annual Conference in Beijing last week. Jiang Wenjie / For China Daily

What a two-day patent information meeting discussed was "of particular significance to slow recovery of the global economic situation and robust advancement of digital technology", according to a senior official of the World Intellectual Property Organization.

"Both were linked to the utilization, sharing, dissemination and management of patent information, "Wang Binying, deputy director-general of WIPO told the Patent Information Annual Conference held in Beijing last week.

The event drew more than 1,800 attendees from China and abroad. "I'm quite impressed by the level of the participants in this year's conference and the expertise they represent," she said.

"Patent information is the key and basis to shape up scientific research and thus promote innovation," she said.

Shen Changyu, commissioner of the State Intellectual Property Office, told the audience that the number of patent documents that SIPO publicized in Chinese surpassed 10 million since the Patent Law took effect in China in 1985.

Filings continued their momentum in the country, with invention patent applications growing 10.8 percent year-on-year to 351,000 in the first half of this year.

During the same period, SIPO dealt with 11,000 international filings through the Patent Cooperation Treaty, up 20.5 percent year-on-year, reinforcing the country's third position in the global PCT ranking last year.

Invention patent applications with IP offices in the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea from China increased 32.6 percent, according to Shen.

"The fast rise in patent numbers and continuous improvement in quality provide a strong support for the popularization and use of Chinese patent information," he noted.

Wu Handong, director of the IP Research Center at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, said Chinese filers accounted for 27.8 percent of global invention patent applications in 2013. They were followed by the US with 23.1 percent, 14.6 percent from Japan and 8 percent from South Korea, according to WIPO statistics.

"Northeast Asia represented by China, Japan and South Korea is the most innovative region in the world," Wu said.

"The data looks impressive," he said. "Yet Chinese companies still see marked differences in access to patents concerning core technologies, compared with their overseas peers," he noted.

A 2013 global innovation report released by media and information firm Thomson Reuter said that in 12 key sectors, including computer, auto, medical equipment and cosmetics, about 60 percent of invention patent applications in the Asia-Pacific region were from Japan, while China's contribution was less than 24 percent.

IP-intensive industries contributed less than 27 percent of China's GDP, while the figure was 34 percent in the US, Wu said. He called for more efforts towards patent commercialization.

He Jia, executive president of Incoshare, a technology information provider, noted the importance of an "easy, trusted" database for decision makers in companies and governments.

It needs to be comprehensive, updated on time and contain not only patent documentation, but also "other resources like industrial standards and legal information", He said.

A reliable, user-friendly database would help locate key information in a vast sea of data, he added.

He cited a database provided by his company as an example. He said it released patent information of more than 2,000 listed companies in the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

He said the tool helped divert capital flows to the real innovation-driven companies, rather than being pushed or begged by governments to invest. He added that investors would voluntarily fund tech firms they have confidence in after studying the patent data.

"A critical component in the effective information management in our company is accessibility - that people have the ability to get the information they need when they need it," said Paul Fehlner, IP head of Novartis Pharma AG.

"It's really important for our business people as well to know what a patent situation is for a product in a given country, in order to have effective business planning," he added.

"We can have the most creative legal theories, we can have the most creative technology, but if we don't file a patent application on time and correctly, if we don't respond to (IP) office action on time and effectively...all their value in technology and legal argument will be lost," Fehlner said. "If you're not on time, you lose your rights."

Since its debut in 2010, the Patent Information Annual Conference has grown into an increasingly open, international and influential platform for exchanges between IP institutes, companies and financiers, according to Bai Guangqing, president of Intellectual Property Publishing House, the host of the event.