Photo by Michael John Desuta via WESVAARRDEC

Seeing the need to protect, and make more of the research of Philippine universities and R&D institutions market-ready, the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) is holding a series of patent drafting and patent search ‘writeshops’ and  training nationwide.

Despite the rising patent filing activity of IPOPHL’s university and R&D organization partners – collectively known as the Innovation and Technology Support Offices (ITSOs) – still, much of their research are not translated to patent applications.

“There is a need to push our ITSOs to file patent applications and encourage them to commercialize the technologies from their research outputs.  This is the main objective of the IPOPHL’s Mind to Market (M2M) program. In the first half of 2018, our ITSO partners have reported that their researchers have a significant number of invention disclosures, and some of these have the potential to be patentable. We need to seize this opportunity so these possibly marketable technologies are protected,” the IPOPHL said.

The patent search and drafting workshops and basic intellectual property management training aim to help the academe and R&D sectors to determine if their technology and research is patentable, and provide practical know-how in drafting a patent application. The writeshops will equip ITSO personnel, faculty, and researchers with the needed skills to prepare patent specifications and claims.

The first writeshop, held in Cebu, was recently concluded, and gathered as much as 50 participants from 13 ITSO partners across Vis-Min. Twenty-three patent filings were generated at the close of the Cebu writeshop.

For this year, two writeshops will be conducted in Manila for Luzon-based ITSOs, another one in Cebu for Visayas and Mindanao ITSOs.

IPOPHL also conducts patent search and patent drafting upon the request of universities, such as those conducted for Our Lady of Fatima University (OLFU) in Valenzuela City and the University of Science and Technology of Southern Philippines (USTP) in Cagayan de Oro City.

At the same time, IPOPHL conducts on-demand training on basic intellectual property management, and concluded one just recently in Iloilo for the technology / IP creators of the Western Visayas Agriculture, Aquatic and Natural Resources Research and Development Consortium.

In 2017, IPOPHL was able to receive 1,034 patent applications (inventions, utility models and industrial designs) from ITSO members. This is a 71 % improvement over the 2016’s patent filing count of just 303 applications.

This year, with the renewed Writeshops,  IPOPHL is targeting to gather 1,180 intellectual property  applications – patents ( for inventions, utility models and industrial designs) and trademarks – from ITSOs.

The DITTB began the Patent Search and Patent Drafting Writeshops in 2016, requiring participants to submit patent filings at the end of each writeshop.