MAIT hosts Awareness Workshop on World Intellectual Property Day 2016
MAIT, in association with Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Government of India and Government of Maharashtra recently organised a high level workshop on creating ‘IPR Awareness’. Embarked under the theme “Digital Creativity: Culture Reimagined“, the occasion was World Intellectual Property Day 2016, commemorated under the aegis of the World Intellectual Property Organisation.
The workshop aimed to provide an appreciation of the importance of Intellectual Property (IP) in gaining competitive advantage and understanding how to protect IP at all levels of business.
The workshop shared dialogue on the importance of IP operations, research and implementation for the ICTE sector.
Speaking at the workshop Shri Vinit Goenka, Member, IT Task Force, Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport and Highways asserted, “Since independence, no Indian citizen has won a Nobel Prize in any technology discipline. India is a laggard in all parameters of innovation. We invest little in research activities; we have among the least science graduates per thousand graduates; our university faculty members don’t publish enough papers; our score in patent filing and approvals are very poor; and we don’t have world class universities. On the occasion of World IP Day, we must all come together and work towards changing this situation. India has the potential and a government with strong will to augment India’s reputation in the research and innovation domain.”
In 2000, WIPO’s member states designated April 26 – the day on which the WIPO Convention came into force in 1970 – as World Intellectual Property Day with the aim of increasing general understanding of IP. World IP Day offers a unique opportunity each year to join with like-minded individuals and business entities from around the globe to consider how IP contributes to the flourishing of digital content, including music and the arts, and to increase the pace of technological innovation across the globe.
The workshop is also to back the new IP ecosystem especially for India which has only 0.15 researchers per thousand population, against 1.03 in China and 7.5 in Finland; per capita public funding of R&D activities was US$ 464 in India versus US$ 2,000 in Korea and Israel, and at only 0.08 citable documents per thousand citizens, India ranked at one-fourth the levels of China, Brazil and Russia.
