Verrassend nieuws van IPEG: 70% van de top 10 innovatieve bedrijven (volgens de bizz/Syntens Innovatie Top 100) heeft geen octrooi op hun innovatie. Zelfs geen aanvraag!
IPEG schrijft enigzins verbouwereerd:
We need to check more thoroughly, but if true this is staggering. What does it tell us? A faulty view on what IP can do for your company? Maybe management thought they could keep the product characteristics secret. Isn’t that unbelievable naïve? Worst of all: all these innovations can be easily copied and used without any compensation to the originators of these innovative ideas. Is that what innovation is al about? Is that where Europe spends millions of euros on, to stimulate new inventive products and services which can be copied by anyone doing some reverse engineering?
Ook Intellectual Asset Magazine maakt zich zorgen:
In some ways small companies without IP rights suit big business – it makes it much easier to appropriate good ideas from them and/or to strike very beneficial deals. But on another level, SMEs that do not get IP are very bad news for the major players. Why? Well, for a start, patent reforms are going to be much harder to achieve in Europe while SMEs do not focus on IP. Until the small guys get serious about the subject in an EU where they make up the overwhelming majority of businesses, IP will be easy to characterise as something that interests only multinational corporations, with all the attendant difficulties that causes people seeking to improve the European patent system. Helping SMEs to understand why IP is so important would be of great benefit to Europe’s big companies because it would mean bringing on board a very powerful ally when they seek to make their case for change.
Arnoud