2009 National Invention and Creation Awards. Over 10 billion-worth of output value created. Over one billion license fee gained.

This year, more products have entered for the 2009 National Invention and Creation Awards with a number of 321 entries, a 34% increase from last year.  A number of 26 enterprises were entered to compete for the awards, which is twice the number of 13 enterprises as that in 2008.  This year the number of entries for the competition has come to a record high.  Among the 56 award winning products, 27 of them have entered into the commercialization stage, which accounts for 48% of the total number of winning products.

Creations that involve daily life activities cover wide range of invention sectors including technology innovations, energy saving and carbon reduction, disaster prevention and protection, environmental friendly, emotion management, and language learning, etc.  These inventions not only have high practicability but also posse tremendous market value, most of the patented products have entered into the commercialization stage and created over 10 billion-worth of market value gaining over one billion worth of license fee.

For the invention awards, products are awarded for their outstanding technology and production methods, whereas for the creation awards, awards are given to products with tremendous market value and high usefulness which have been applied to mainframe computers and cell phones.  Other patented devises including energy dissipation devices under earthquake excitation, vocal control devices used to comfort men’s and animals’ emotions.  The award winning works represent strong R&D capabilities covering private sectors, academia and research institutes.

The Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) points out that the grading criteria for this year’s awards are: number of patent applications (20%), patent value (40%).  It is evident from the characteristics of grading criteria, TIPO put emphasis on quality rather than on quantity.

A total of 26 enterprises have entered to compete for the contribution awards this year.  Criteria for giving the contribution awards including the total number of patent applications of the enterprise during the past 4 years, the patent value, the practicability of patent and research incentives offered to employees.  Patents are entitled to enter into competition for awards once.  During the past four years, among the 500 patent applications filed by the award winning institution -- Electronics of Optoelectronics Research Laboratories of ITRI, 273 of them have been converted to actual use.  In other words, the utility rate for ITRI’s patent applications is over 50% with over TWD1.4 billion license fee gained.

Among all of the award winning products, mobile phones manufactured by the HTC Corporation has created the highest market value; HTC mobile phones are sold in 40 countries worldwide with TWD14 billion worth of patent value.

TIPO emphasized that other than providing incentives to the outstanding patent products, the competent government organizations will provide relevant measures including exhibitions, technology trading and innovation and incubation for encouraging award winning products to pursue further patent commercialization.
(2009.08)
/DC