The 2013 China Patent Information Annual Conference got underway in Beijing Thursday. The conference is the biggest of its kind in Asia. About two thousand attendees from around the world discuss how intellectual property protection can promote innovation.
China has set sights on innovation to expedite development.
Intellectual property plays a key role in this national strategy.
China has held the world’s most number of patent applications ranking for a few years now.
"The number of invention patents is growing at an average annual growth of over 25 percent. It reached 653 thousand items last year. Some of our companies have even started their global strategy. This all shows China’s innovation power has been unleased. "said Tian Lipu, Commissioner of State Intellectual Property Office.
China’s effort to boost information consumption is expected to bring over 1.2 trillion yuan worth of value to related industries, and even more down the track.
"Now any new invention can be quickly spread to the whole world through patents. I think this market is tremendous. "said Tian.
A more concrete instance of the service this industry provides is an information platform.
"Our patent data base has 70 million items from 90 countries and regions. We also use Cloud Computing technique, and machine translation to translate documents in foreign languages."said Guang Qingbai, President&CEO of Intellectual Property Publishing House.
"Machine translation, patent database, and search platform, are just some examples of innovative businesses waiting to take advantage of China’s booming information industry, which is shifting to focus more on efficiency, quality, and application."
"China’s trademark application volume has topped the rankings in the past few years, but out of the top 500 world famous brands, China only has 22. We should start to bolster our branding power."said Wu Handong, President of Zhongnan Univ.of Econ&Law.
And there is still plenty of room for improvement.
"The system of utility model registrations is still subject to a lot of abuse, which can actually hamper innovations in China. That system needs to be made more fair."said David J.Kappos, partner of Cravath,Swaine&Moore LLP.
Much like Chinese economic growth, the global trend on patents is going from quantity to quality -- countries like Japan focus more on whether technologies can be monetised to determine if they should be granted patent protection.