Sensitise startups on IPR role: Expert

Visakhapatnam: NOTED Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) expert Prof H Purushotham on Wednesday said handholding startups to make them aware of the need to go for trade marking and patenting is the key to improving ranking in innovation index.

He told Bizz Buzz that there is a lot of scope to improve the country's ranking in the innovation index due to the availability of a large pool of talented youth and called for strengthening the startup ecosystem.

Purushotham, former CMD of National Research Development Corporation (NRDC), said commercialisation of innovation technologies would give a big push to R&D efforts in science and technology. He said out of the box ideas and implementing them by the startups with proper guidance were the need of the hour.

Purushotham, who is the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion IPR Chair at Andhra University, while delivering the keynote address at a webinar organised jointly by MSME-DI Cuttack, Cell for IPR Promotion and Management (CIPAM) and Central Tool Room & Training Centre (CTTC), Bhubaneswar on benefits of trademark, patent and copyrights for startups, said Intellectual Property (IP) protection in the form of patents, trademarks, industrial designs and copyrights are a must particularly for startups and MSMES to be sustainable in the competitive global markets.

He said IP protection offers several benefits like an entry barrier for others to enter into the market for the same product or service, positive market image, enhanced bargaining power in transactions, exclusivity and higher monetary returns. He presented a number of cases on how startups got benefitted by protecting their IPs like getting government grants for scale-up and prototypes, attracting seed and venture funding and higher valuations.

The expert said, "Unfortunately many startups are not fully aware of the benefits of the IP protection and there are also several challenges in securing the IP rights such as the low awareness about identification of IP content and lack of understanding the processes."

"IP protection involves complex techno-legal knowledge, getting the IP rights and its maintenance is cumbersome and expensive," he remarked. He highlighted that both the State and Central Governments were taking several initiatives to create awareness and remove the bottlenecks in the IP value chain such as introducing reimbursement of patent costs, reducing the filing costs, empanelling patent and trademark attorneys and agents to support startups to file patents free of cost under Startup Intellectual Property (SIPP) scheme so that the IP filings of the country are enhanced.

"As of now they are not a huge number compared to our population and R&D expenditure," he said and added that many government agencies like NRDC, TIFAC, BIRAC and MSME and MEITY had schemes to file patents free of cost and reimbursement of patent filing costs. Inventors, incubation centers and startups should make use of these government schemes effectively to augment the existing ecosystem, he emphasised.

PK Gupta, Joint Director, MSME-DI, Cuttack, Mayank Sood, registered patent agent, CIPAM and Santosh Kumar Sahu, Assistant Director, MSME-DI spoke at the webinar.