Spanish Patent and Trademark Office presents its Strategy 2012-2014
On 11th May 2012 the Spanish Ministry for Industry Energy and Tourism throughout the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office launched the 2012-2014 Strategy for Industrial Property (IP hereinafter) for enterprises and entrepreneurs.
The said Strategy is aligned with the Europe 2020 Strategy and intends to get IP constituted as a key tool for decision making and rational and efficient planning for Spanish companies and entrepreneurs.
Within the Spanish economic panorama, and as the very same Strategy points out, small and medium sized enterprises altogether with entrepreneurs are not only ‘the driving force (…) but also the major contributors to job creation’.
However, it has been verified that these agents do barely exploit in full their creative and innovative potential; this is very often caused by the lack of knowledge of the IP system and the range of possibilities it offers for the protection of their inventions, trademarks and designs.
With the intention to right this wrong, the above mentioned Strategy is focused on boosting differentiation and specialization and increase the efficiency of the Spanish industrial tissue on the basis of a more effective and widespread use of IP instruments.
For this, 5 action lines have been foreseen, all mentioned in the following paragraphs altogether with some of the specific actions and strategic goals for each of them.
- Enterprise support for obtaining IP rights: establish some mechanisms- collaboration agreements, financial support, consultancy services- in order to ease and improve access to IP rights and increase their use as a key tool for internationalization.
- Raise awareness on IP rights: promote the diffusion of the benefits provided by the protection of intangible assets by mean of IP rights, both in the business-seminars, dissemination activities, targeted capacity building- and educational environments-integration of IP in the academic curricula both at high school and university levels, creation of a specialized network of IP teachers-.
- Incentive IP rights enforcement: make the judiciary, custom officers and right holders aware of the relevance of IP enforcement and proceed likewise with end users and media regarding the potential harm caused by IP infringement.
- Reduction of the administrative formalities for the granting of IP rights: make the granting procedure more flexible, ease access to users via new technologies, reduce examination deadlines, waiting times and procedural costs.
- Entrepreneur support for obtaining IP rights: implement some mechanisms -cut down administrative burdens and granting charges, promote tax incentives linked to innovation- so that entrepreneurs can access more easily IP rights.
Salvador Ferrandis and Partners welcomes the new Strategy. It is coherent with the political will to change the economic model in our country started with the Socialist government and followed by Mariano Rajoy’s Cabinet.