Organises Awareness Workshop and underlines India’s poor R&D expenditure which stays persistently below 1% of GDP
MAIT, in association with the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India and Government of Maharashtra organised a high level workshop on creating ‘IPR Awareness’. The occasion was World Intellectual Property Day 2016, celebrated under the aegis of the World Intellectual Property Organisation. The event focused on IPR as a Growth Strategy to enable Small and Medium Enterprises SMEs and Start-ups scale.
Started back in 2000, the World Intellectual day, April 26 is the day on which the WIPO Convention came into force in 1970 – as World Intellectual Property Day with the aim of increasing general understanding of IP. World IP Day offers the opportunity each year to join with like-minded individuals and business entities from around the globe to consider how IP contributes to the flourishing of digital content, including music and the arts, and to increase the pace of technological innovation across the globe.
According to the press release, the issue of creating new IP is especially relevant to India which has only 0.15 researchers per thousand population, against 1.03 in China and 7.5 in Finland; per capita public funding of R&D activities was US$ 464 in India versus US$ 2,000 in Korea and Israel, and at only 0.08 citable documents per thousand citizens, India ranked at one-fourth the levels of China, Brazil and Russia.
The theme of the workshop was “Digital Creativity: Culture Reimagined” and aimed to provide an appreciation of the importance of IP in gaining competitive advantage and understanding how to protect IP at all levels of business. The workshop covered areas such as the importance of IP operations, research and implementation for the ICTE sector.
During the course of the day-long workshop, IP experts from leading government, industry and legal organisations presented keynotes and participated in panel discussions to discuss issues such as – Effective Utilisation of IP Tools in the ICTE industry in India; Software and Hardware patenting and new IPR guidelines; Copyright issues and challenges in the ICTE industry; Government Schemes and Initiatives; Technology Licensing in a Strategic Partnership; Patent Information System; Importance of IP Audit for MSMEs; Best Practices in Technology Transfer and Litigation Strategies, especially in relation to MSMEs; Consulting the right partner for IP commercialisation, and so on.
Vinit Goenka, Member, IT Task Force, Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport and Highways said, “Since independence, no Indian citizen has won a Nobel Prize in any technology discipline. India is a laggard in all parameters of innovation. We invest little in research activities; we have among the least science graduates per thousand graduates; our university faculty members don’t publish enough papers; our score in patent filing and approvals are very poor; and we don’t have world class universities.”
Anwar Shirpurwala, Executive Director, MAIT added, “In today’s fast changing global business environment, we aimed to bring into focus how IP strategy can be used to build sustainable competitive advantage by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Start-ups over the long term, how to create monetisable assets, enable the IPR Research & Development team to create adaptable technologies, promote responsible use of IP in compliance with Indian legal requirements, and provide tactical business advantage in the short term.”
