Policy News

Business Creation
- Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Jobs
Intellectual Property
- European Patents On-Line

Business Creation

Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Jobs

New high-tech companies are emerging at a reasonable rate in Europe, but too few ever grow big enough to be a force on world markets and a major source of new jobs.

In response, Edith Cresson, the Member of the European Commission responsible for research, innovation and education, is calling on financiers, entrepreneurs, researchers and public authorities to help find new ways to create jobs out of the EU's potential for innovation.

In December she brought together 100 key players in the field of technological innovation for a round-table discussion in Paris. The points raised are now being analysed in depth by working groups set up to examine the different stages in the creation of a new business:

first steps - finding ideas for new businesses, planning the business, legal issues, seed capital;
getting the business going - start-up capital, business incubators, support services, managing a new business;
growth - financing and managing growth, diversification, moving to international markets.

One of the key issues is likely to be that new businesses have different needs at each stage of development. In the area of management, for example, the initiator of a new high-tech company, often from a research background, may have to be willing to pass the reins to an experienced entrepreneur as the business gets off the ground. Later the entrepreneur may in turn have to take a back seat in favour of a team of motivated managers with the skills to grow the business into a significant company on an international scale.

The working groups will look for barriers and problems arising at each stage of a new business, collect examples of 'good practice', and propose possible solutions, particularly for implementation at the European level.

Conference in May

Their ideas and findings will be examined at a conference in Luxembourg on 18-19 May. The results of the work will then be presented to a panel of entrepreneurs during the first European forum for new technology-based enterprises, which the Commission is planning to hold in Vienna towards the end of the year, in cooperation with the Austrian Presidency of the EU Council.

The Paris round-table was held a year after the European Commission launched its First Action Plan for Innovation in Europe (1). In January Mme Cresson published the Commission's first report on the implementation of the Action Plan (2), which confirmed that issues such as intellectual property, access to financing, administrative simplification, and developing the enterprise spirit continue to be priorities for the Commission.

This was underlined directly after the round-table, when the first contracts under the I-TEC pilot project (3), launched by the Commission in collaboration with the European Investment Fund (EIF), were signed between the Commission and nine venture capital funds.

The funds will be helped to develop the expertise necessary to evaluate high-tech investment opportunities, and to participate in the management of the businesses which they decide to invest in. In return, each has agreed to build up their investments in the early stages of technologically innovative companies.

(1) See Special Edition of Innovation & Technology Transfer, December 1996.
(2) The report was distributed to Innovation & Technology Transfer subscribers, as a supplement, in February. For further copies, see Contact details.
(3) See edition 1/98.

Contact:
R. Miège, A. Tokofai, DG XIII/D-4
Fx. +352 4301 34544

Intellectual Property

European Patents On-Line

A searchable database of 25 million European patent documents will be made available via the Internet later this year. Linking together 20 servers to provide 20 terabytes of data, it will eclipse all other patent information sites in sheer size.

The present state of the patent system in the EU

Published by the Innovation Programme, this study examines the current provisions for patent protection in the EU and compares the situation with that of the USA and Japan. Deficiencies of the present system are highlighted by a number of empirical studies. It concludes that the EU should transfer both the European Patent Convention (EPC) and the Agreement relating to Community Patents (ACP) into the Community legal order.

As its working title - "Distributed Internet Patent Services" - implies, the World Wide Web (WWW) patent database is a triumph of European cooperation. It will link together the servers of the 18 national members of the European Patent Organisation with those of the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Intellectual Property Rights Help Desk of the EC's Innovation Programme (1). First demonstrations are planned for the middle of the year, while the full service is planned to go on-line after the summer.

Each national server, naturally, will provide national patent information, while the EPO server takes care of European patents, both those granted directly by the EPO and granted to non-European inventors on the basis of international applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty. Together, these servers will create a searchable database of 25 million documents, 'weighing in' at 20 terabytes of data - 1,000 times larger than the US and Japanese equivalents.

The Innovation Programme server, finally, will provide multilingual search facilities, along with extensive tutorials on intellectual property as part of its IPR Help Desk services, which are scheduled to be launched in September in parallel with the WWW database.

World-wide Search

Most users will access the database via their national office's server, which provides an interface in the country's language(s). Each server will use the same, harmonised interface to provide the same search services, and will transmit the user's queries to the other 19 nodes. In this way the entire 25 million patent documents from around the world can be searched using one simple query.

The service is therefore, in essence, using new technologies to make patent information - already publicly available via the EPO's ESPACE series of CD-ROMs - more accessible, particularly to SMEs who do not need to access patent information on a daily basis. The EPO underlines that only basic search services will be provided. The most popular search will probably be a simple 'free text' search of the patent abstract, perhaps combined with bibliographic criteria such as country, year, and so on. The body of the patent document is retrieved as an image file.

This may not replace the 'value-added' services provided by patent experts, but it does represent a massive saving for European industry, particularly SMEs. Even when the EPO waived royalty rights and charged just enough to cover costs, their CD-ROMs cost each user several hundred ECU each year. It is also, of course, much more up to date and easier to use.

Seeing whether a technical innovation has already been developed will therefore become significantly easier, helping European companies avoid wasting their resources 'reinventing the wheel'.

(1) See last issue for the Call for Tender.

Contact:
G. Jiroud, EPO
Fx. +43 1 521 26 54 91
jiroud@epo.co.at
Http://www.european-patent-office.org/index.htm
IPR Helpdesk: M. Schmiemann, DG XIII/D-1
Tl. +352 4301 33353
Fx. +352 4301 32073
manfred.schmiemann@ec.europa.eu

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