MUSCAT: The Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion (MoCIIP) says it plans to harness the opportunities provided by the Technology and Innovation Support Center (TISC) programme provided by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) as a part of the latter’s strategic goal to enable countries to access patent information, scientific and technical literature and search tools and databases, and make more effective use of it to boost their intellectual property (IP) skills, use and to enhance technology transfer.
According to the Ministry, WIPO is designing a working methodology for the intellectual property databases of member states, as it aims at international comparison of data and methodologies.
The global design incorporates the current international best practices in structuring IP data for the purposes of economic analysis.
To this end, the Ministry seeks to obtain best practices from leading intellectual property offices including (WIPO), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (UPSTO), the European Patent Office (EPO), the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) and any other source related to intellectual property data and economic data.
Eng Khalid bin Hamoud al Hinai, Head of Patents and Industrial Designs at National Intellectual Property Office of the Ministry, said: “The ministry seeks to establish a national network at the Technology Transfer and Innovation Support Centre in order to benefit from the services it provides, and to invest inventions and turn them into national products , which can be marketed locally and globally, where the ministry is exerting efforts to encourage the submission of patent applications of individual and establishments’ investors by providing high-quality government services in accordance with the strategic targets of Oman vision 2040.
He added that the WIPO Programme on TISCs for the WIPO Member States provides the chances to access to technological information, which helps the inventors to exploit their creative potential, developing their intellectual property rights, protecting and managing it.
The services provided by the WIPO Programme include access to international electronic sources of scientific and technical patents related to patents, as this contributes to the boost technology transfer, while this technical information can also be used to solve many problems that facing the existing and emerging modern industries.
Eng Al Hinai added: “The Technology and Innovation Support Centers also provide training in how to search for technical information of patents, which contributes to enhancing the results of the research , where it helps to strengthen the inventor’s idea and the possibility of protecting his/her idea by searching in documents similar or close to the same idea through the electronic sources (international databases) in order to save effort, money and time for the owner of the idea and reducing repetitive ideas as well as focusing on new and unique ideas that can be converted into commercial and industrial projects.”
In addition, these sources include important technical information that can be sorted and categorized, to provide a detailed picture to the policymakers that show them the trends of modern technology in accordance with the market changes, where it can facilitate the transfer of technology and localizing the modern technology and thus contribute strongly to the emergence of a modern manufacturing of national products capable of competing with other products in the local, regional and international markets , and as a result, will contribute to enhancing the economic diversification in accordance with the Oman vision 2040.
