The Twelfth Five-Year Plan on intellectual property of Anhui province has been recently issued. The Plan delineates IP development goals and tasks from 2011 to 2015, stating that by 2015, patent applications and grants will have amounted to 80 thousand and 40 thousand respectively, enterprises will have submitted over 60% of all those applications, and the number of invention patent applications per 10,000 persons will have reached 3.4.

Pursuant to the Plan, relevant departments should quickly formulate and implement a development strategy on promoting intellectual property development in the province, and formulate IP development strategies for industrial transfer demonstration regions of the city-cluster centralized in Wanjiang city as well as for indigenous innovation pilot regions of Hefei city, Wuhu city and Bengbu city.

In terms of IP utility and industrialization, the Plan stresses that departments in charge should encourage enterprises to give full play to their capabilities to promote IP development and protection. Meanwhile, they should provide full support to the industrialization of patented-technologies, striving to establish special funding to award enterprises for their excellent performance in patent applications and industrialization.

The Plan also draws up a blueprint that by 2015, the province will have newly established 50 national IP pilot enterprises, 10 IP demonstration enterprises, and cultivated 100 IP exemplary enterprises at the provincial level and 500 IP model enterprises at the municipal level. The average annual growth rate of patent applications and grants will have reached 20%.

During the Eleventh Five-Year Plan period, the province saw a significant growth in patent filings. Patent applications and grants accumulated to 84,672 and 34,600 respectively, increasing by 68.0% and 52.5%. [Chinese version is available on most.gov.cn]

(Source: IPR in China)