"With the development of the global-level PCT-ROAD, KIPO has secured a firm status as a patent office leading international norms and establishment of informatization standardization in the intellectual property rights field," said Jun.
"In the future, KIPO will strengthen the exports of PCT-ROAD based on persistent efforts for improvement of quality as a means of publicizing KIPO abroad," said the KIPO head.
KIPO has already supplied PCT-ROAD to Israel, Egypt, Vietnam, the Philippines, India, Singapore and Finland.
"Currently, patents offices of Spain and Malaysia are requesting KIPO to export PACT-ROAD. In particular, patent offices of Spain and Morocco are expressing their intention for joint cooperation with KIPO through offering of their funds, along with the application for the use of PACT-ROAD," Jun said.
"By exporting PCT-ROAD to a number of patent offices in the world, the patent net system of KIPO has won global-level recognition in terms of function and effectiveness. At the same time, KIPO has succeeded in attracting funds from overseas patent offices, greatly contributing to national interest," said the KIPO commissioner.
"At the same time, KIPO plans to actively push for exports of Korea's e-government system. Recently, a number of Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, prefer the Korea-type patent administration innovative system.
"Related to this, KIPO will soon finalize its participation in the project to build an intellectual property rights center in Thailand. After this, we plan to expand exports of egovernment system to Southeast Asia and Latin America," he said.
Along with this, KIPO has persistently innovated patents administration with an eye to offering high quality services to customers and realize a powerhouse with knowledge property. Thanks to such strenuous efforts, it has developed the "KIPOnet system."
KIPOnet system refers to e-government system that electronizes all knowledge property-related businesses ranging from application to registration. It is an online patent application system that introduced electronics application for the first time in the world.
With the development of the KIPOnet system, the business paradigm of KIPO has changed to a paperless business environment and a working at home system, if necessary. KIPOnet system also means a customer service system that offers customers a variety of high quality services, including 24-hour online electronics applications and mobile phone letter service.
With the operation of the KIPOnet system, KIPO has succeeded in maximizing business efficiency and saved about 415.6 billion won ($432.9 million) in expenses necessary for dealing with civil petitions and other administrative procedures in 2005. "As the superiority of KIPOnet system is becoming more widely known, about 30 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Egypt, Finland, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, Spain, Taiwan and Vietnam, have already benchmarked the KIPOnet," he said.
In particular, eight countries, including India, the Philippines and Vietnam, received consulting service on informatization from KIPO. In the meantime, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) selected KIPO as an institution to offer consulting service on informatization of intellectual property rights to developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
WIPO also highly appraised the superiority of KIPOnet and selected PCTROAD as an international standard, while supplying the system globally.
KIPO plans to further develop the KIPOnet system to provide customers with higher level of intellectual property rights administration service in the future. Meanwhile, KIPO has been exerting best efforts to increase cooperation with such international patent institutions as WIPO and European Patent Office (EPO), in addition to bilateral cooperation with major countries including the United States, Japan and Germany.
Since its conclusion of a basic cooperation pact with WIPO in 2001, KIPO has been strengthening its cooperative relations with the WIPO. Based on the agreement, KIPO established Korea Trust Fund within WIPO to support developing countries in the intellectual property rights field.
Since 2004, KIPO has trusted WIPO with 1.6 billion won ($1.7 million) and propelled eight projects to build a foundation for informatization and help small and medium-sized companies bolster their ability to create intellectual property rights in 33 developing countries.
Taking into account the upgraded status of Korea in WIPO and developing countries' high appraisal of Korea Trust Fund, KIPO plans to expand its contribution to the fund further in the future.
Also, International Intellectual Property Training Institute (IIPTI) of KIPO produced a total of 1,250 foreign specialists in intellectual property rights in developing countries in the past 20 years through international education training programs and international seminars.
In recognition of its excellent operation of international education training programs on intellectual property rights, KIPO was designated as an official education training institution by WIPO last March for the first time in the world, becoming the benchmarking target by many countries.
Besides, in terms of international applications based on Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), South Korea ranked 6th in the world in 2005, outpacing the Netherlands.
In addition, KIPO signed a mutual cooperation pact with EPO in June last year. Under the pact, both sides will activate use of patent-related information and connect the KIPO's computer network to the TRInet now being operated by patent offices in the United States, Europe and Japan.
| The following are excerpts from the interview with Jun Sang-woo, commissioner of KIPO.... Ed. Q: KIPO was selected as the best innovative government agency last year. Would you comment on this achievement We mapped out such reform-minded strategies as establishment of a master plan for management of changes and discovery of mid and long-term tasks for innovation and carried out the strategies systematically. In particular, we have strongly pushed for result-based management, 6Sigma management, knowledge management and customer satisfaction-oriented management. For instance, we have operated 61 study groups within KIPO as a means of strengthening knowledge management. Q: Would you introduce main contents of the result-based management system Based on the balanced scorecard (BSC) model, KIPO has operated an organization result management system and an individual result management system. By linking appraisal results of organization and individuals with a compensation system covering promotion and bonus payment, KIPO has offered incentives to achieve strategic goals to officials. Thanks to its strenuous efforts for strategic result management, KIPO won the Korea BSC grand prize in 2006. Q: KIPO has set customer impression as its top management target. Would you introduce details of the plan to achieve the target On May 1, KIPO declared the management to impress customers and decided to push for customer-oriented corporate-style management. First of all, KIPO newly established or improved various systems for customers, including a drastic cut in many patent-related commissions. Secondly, we began to offer the face-to-face service for customers under which KIPO officials make direct visits to customers and solve their problems in April. Thirdly, we are actively pushing ahead with curtailing documents related to civil petitions by more than 30 percent before the end of this year by making the best use of the state-of-the-art management technique 6Sigma. |
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