Patent Drive 2016 Launch

Patent Drive 2016 was formally launched on 29th Sept., 2016 evening. The function was held at S. N. Bose Auditorium, IIT Kharagpur. The Technology Transfer Group (TTG) students were in charge of the event#. IPR experts and Domain experts who play an important role in handholding the inventors from invention disclosure to patent filing were backing up the young team. Director, IIT Kharagpur who could not be present due to an emergency meeting at Delhi sent good wishes to the Patent Drive team for the launch event.

The program started at 6:30 PM. After TTG welcome, Dean (Continuing Education) addressed the audience on behalf of the institute explaining the importance of IP protection, commercialization and how IP contributes to overall assessment of the institute. Following this, the TTG team explained the in-house Patent Portal (Link) to the inventors. They showed new feature of the portal for this edition of the drive that facilitates speedier review. It included an innovative approach to help patent search and that feature is being further improved. The modified Invention Disclosure Form / Abstract can be downloaded from here (PDF, Word). The team explained the new Geographical Indications (G.I.) Portal of the institute in connection with newly launched G.I. Drive of last convocation day (GI Portal Link).

The major attraction of the evening was the guest-talk from Prof. Ganesh S Hingmire, Chairman, Great Mission Group Consultancy, Pune. He is the winner of National IP Award in G.I. category for two consecutive years 2015, 2016. He came with his experience of registering 19 G.I.s out of which 17 are Agri. GIs. His work on another 9 Agri. GI applications is waiting for registration. He had conducted hundreds of small group meetings of farmers to create awareness on GI and its benefits and 12 awareness seminars for the Office of the Controller of Patents. He held the audience captive by explaining how G.I. gives community the IP right in contrast to Patent right being enjoyed by an individual and how G.I. can help propel economic growth for the community.

After a short tea-break at 8:00 PM, the Q & A session started at 8:15 PM. While the initial questions were related to G.I., soon it widened to consider issues related to Patenting and the special aspects of patent drive, commercialization benefit sharing with inventors etc. The session ended at 9:00 PM when there were still queries which the Patent Drive team are to take up offline, on a one to one basis.

We share two videos of this launch function, the address by Prof. Hingmire and the Q & A session for the benefit of the inventors. Some photos from the launch function follow.

#Patent Drive 2016 launch is supported by MHRD IPR Chair Professor grant.

Patent Drive 2016: Prelaunch Activities

In the run up to Patent Drive 2016, a one and half day long workshop, comprising of three sessions, was held during Sept. 24-25, 2016 at NKN Room, Dept. of Electronics & ECE, IIT Kharagpur.

In the first session, Dr. J. K. Pradhan, Deputy Controller, Kolkata Patent Office was the main speaker. He explained basics of patenting, Patent Office practices and presented various case studies. Towards the end of the session, he along with our in-house experts attended queries of the workshop participants. In the second session, Mr. Sujith Subramanian, Manager, SRI-B CTO/ IPR Dept., Samsung R & D, Bangalore kept audience captive discussing strengths and weaknesses of academic IP and gave direction how to generate quality IP from academic R & D. There was Q & A session at the end of this session, too. In the third session, Dr. Sanchita Ganguli, Patent Attorney from S. Majumdar & Co. explained the significance of patent / claim drafting and also the means to do it by real-life examples. A Q & A session followed at the end. The workshop had an important take-home message - quality patent requires quality invention and quality drafting.

A post workshop follow-up was arranged yesterday evening, 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM at RCC Seminar Room, Dept. of Electronics & ECE to clear specific doubts of our inventors. With these prelaunch activities, we are looking for a successful launch of Patent Drive 2016 tomorrow. Here, are some pictures of the two warming-up events. The videos of the talk didn't come that well; however, we are sharing the links as major part of it can be found useful (Dr. Pradhan, Mr. Sbramanian, Dr. Ganguli). [We have better recording of the technical sessions of launch function dated 29th Sept. in the next post.]

Patent Drive 2016

Calling representatives of all research lab.s, innovation centres, hall tech. teams and, individual researchers, nearly ready with an invention disclosure to attend the pre-launch workshop of the new edition of Patent Drive scheduled on 24-25th Sept., 2016 at NKN Room, Dept. of Electronics & ECE, IIT Kharagpur! Individuals can work together with the patent drive team on drafting for a week and Patent Drive 3rd edition* can look for a mega launch with large number of abstract / disclosure submissions in the patent portal on the launch day itself! The target is 100 submission in 100 days like every other edition of patent drive.

Registration is free but mandatory. Limited seats are available for the workshop (75). Hurry, before it gets filled up! The speaker list include Deputy Controller from Kolkata Patent Office, Attorney from Patent Firm, Expert from Patent Office of Samsung, Bangalore. Besides patentability and patent drafting, the discussion will cover commercialization aspect too.

Registration link http://tinyurl.com/patentdrive16

Note: All registered within 12:00 noon of 23rd Sept., 2016 are confirmed of their participation by creating additional capacity in the workshop venue. All confirmed participants have been informed by email of workshop schedule. We regret that anyone registering later cannot be accommodated in this pre-launch workshop due to space constraint. However, other services that come with post-workshop follow up activities will be extended to such candidates by creating a special window, which will be communicated to them separately.

The 29th Sept., 2016 evening launch event at S. N. Bose Auditorium is open to all! The special invitee for this function will be National IP Award winner in G. I. category.

(*Patent Drive is supported by MHRD IPR Chair Professor grant)

National IP Award 2016

"IIT Kharagpur Awarded Prize for 'Top Academic Institute for Patents 2016' by Government of India -- Our "100 Patents Drive" Efforts are now giving Results. Congratulations to all, especially the Core Team. Let us keep up the Tempo and do it all over again!" 

 ~Prof. Partha P. Chakrabarti, Director, IIT Kharagpur 

As per the recent communications received from Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks and also, Executive Director, Confederation of Indian Industry, IIT Kharagpur has been selected as a winner for the National Intellectual Property (IP) Awards in the category of "Top Indian Academic institution for Patents". 

Director, IIT Kharagpur will receive this award on 26th April, 2016, World IP Day, from Hon'ble Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman, Minister of Commerce and Industry, Govt. of India, at a function jointly organized by the Indian Intellectual Property Office and Confederation of Indian Chamber of Commerce & Industry (CII). The National IP Award carries an amount of Rs. 1,00,000/-, a citation and a memento. 

In 2014, there was no winner declared in this category. In 2015, IIT Bombay came as winner.

Update of 10-04-2016: The following are some of the media coverage on this news.

NDTV, Economic Times, Business Standard, The Hindu, The Statesman, Outlook India, Sify News, Times of India

IPR Round Table

In a new study initiated by IPR Office, IIT Kharagpur in the current year, feasibility of a new model of IP prosecution system is debated that can fast-track enforcement of IP with reduction of time and steps. IP is time-stamped and the protection is available for a finite period only. A slow trial on IP litigation is costly on various counts. This raises concerns for innovators without deep-pocket like that from academia and also for those who wants certainty of outcome in a finite time to go for IP based investment in our country. This feasibility study project is funded by UK Intellectual Patent Office (IPO). The idea of this study came when IIT Kharagpur IPR team had an interaction with UK IPO team members on 2nd June, 2015 at British Deputy High Commission, Kolkta. 

The first round table on this study took place on April 02, 106 at Conference Room of IIT Khragpur Kolkata Extension Centre. It was attrended by Hon'ble Justice Prabha Sridevan, Former Judge Madras High court and Chairman IPAB; Dr. V.C. Vivekanandan, MHRD IPR Chair Professor, NALSAR University of Law; Prof. V.K. Unni, Associate Professor at the Public Policy and Management Group of IIM Calcutta; Mr. S. Majumder, Partner, S. Majumder& Co. Leading IP attorney; Mr. .K.Chakraborty, Partner, MKC & Associate Leading IP attorney; Mr. Gautam Banerjee, Principal Associate Khaitan& Co. IP attorney; Mr. Sudipta Ghosh, Head-IP Management, Wipro Technologies Ltd; Mr. Pranay Agarwal, Consultant - Intellectual Property Rights & Consulting Attorney for Commonwealth at Longbow Legal Services; Mr. Debrabata Das, IP Maangement Team, CTS; Representative from CMERI; faculty and research students of IIT Kharagpur. Opinions of experts who could not attend the round table physically are made available through emails. 

The half-day round table showed emergence of three alternative approaches - one of which requires major intervention for which process appears to be complicated, second one requires minor intervention but still is an intervention and the third is having certain structural and functional changes in the existing system for which the process may not be as complicated. We are on our way to consolidate the thoughts and ideas of the discussion.