Bottleneck in getting innovation from the lab to the factory floor

Chinese companies need to improve their capacity in creation, application, protection and management of intellectual property to sharpen their core competitiveness, Tian Lipu, director of the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO), said at an annual conference held recently in Beijing.

"To shift away from energy intensive, heavily polluting and high-risk development is not only our international responsibility in the face of climate change, but also the requirements for China's own development," Tian noted.

Growth of emerging industries and modernization of traditional sectors both need intellectual property support in core technologies, he added.

"Without proprietary intellectual property, the Chinese economy can only stay at the low-end of industrial chain."

"Capacity in innovation as well as proper use of intellectual property is key to a country's comprehensive competitiveness," he noted.

Tian cited President Hu Jintao saying that intellectual property is the key to modern corporate competition.

Companies short of proprietary technology and brands have become the most vulnerable group amid the worldwide economic turmoil in the past 18 months.

With increasing intellectual property awareness, more companies have begun to highly value protection of their proprietary technologies.

Statistics show that companies and corporations contributed nearly 45 percent of the country's total 976,686 domestic patent applications in 2009, up 3.7 percentage points over the previous year. 
                                                                                                      Source: China Daily