Supporting innovation

We support innovation through our core legal functions. The Intellectual Property (IP) rights we grant, such as patents, provide protection which encourages people to spend time and money developing inventions. Our tribunal activities help ensure rights are enforced in an affordable and accessible manner.

We also support innovation by ensuring that IP law and policy reflect the needs of an evolving, knowledge based, competitive economy. Our IP awareness raising activities promote the benefits of IP, which in turn encourages innovation.

We believe we have more to offer. We employ 250 highly qualified and experienced scientists, and have powerful IT systems and access to global IP databases. We are exploring how to use these assets to broaden our support for innovation beyond our traditional core functions.

To deploy these assets in the most effective and efficient way, we have prepared a draft strategy for supporting innovation. The strategy sets out our vision and role together with an extensive list of proposed support activities. Some of these will involve working in partnership with other organizations.

To ensure our proposals complement and add value to activities undertaken by other organizations, we launched a public consultation on the strategy. The responses of the consultation will allow us to review and prioritise the proposed activities. From this we can identify where we expect the greatest benefits to arise. We will then devise an implementation for the prioritised elements of the strategy.