New European Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Heldpesk looks back on successful first year
One year ago, in March 2011, the new team behind the service initiative funded by the European Commission officially launched its activities. With a more business-oriented approach and an additional focus on European small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) the Luxembourgish-German consortium of three partners (infeurope S.A. Centre Recherche Public Henri Tudor & Eurice GmbH) set out to provide free of charge, first-line advice on Intellectual Property and Intellectual Property Rights issues to scientists and SMEs involved in collaborative R&D projects and/or transnational partnership agreements. “All our services are dedicated to offer practical, straightforward IP support, to help researchers and SMEs to build up capacities to deal with their intellectual assets and to integrate adequate IP management strategies in their day-to-day business”, Stefan Geier, managing director of infeurope S.A. and coordinator of the project, outlines the Helpdesk’s mission. “Looking back on these first twelve months I believe we have done a good job in establishing an attractive service portfolio that is catering to the needs and requirements of our target groups”, Geier continues. Looking back at a successful year: achievements of 2011 Much has been achieved since the official start last year. The Helpdesk’s helpline service backed-up by a team of IP lawyers, who answer individual IP inquiries within three working days, responded to 600 questions from universities and SMEs in the last twelve months. The majority of questions were thereby concerned with issues related to IP and IPR in the context of collaborative research projects funded under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). In addition, the team participated in more than 50 training and awareness raising events and launched a programme of web-based training sessions last October. Since then these “webinars” have attracted more than 1,500 registrations from people all across Europe. Based on a set of nine different training modules specifically targeted either at researchers or SMEs, all training activities aim at providing participants with a well-balanced mixture of basic concepts and practical examples. Last not least, regular newsletters and bulletins have kept users up-to-date on recent developments in the world of IP and R&D. Plus: A growing number of fact sheets and guides available on the Helpdesk’s website provide hands-on information and practical guidance on how to tackle IP issues in business or at the different stages of an EU-funded collaborative research project. Building on these achievements the Helpdesk team will keep up their efforts to offer services that best match the expectations and requirements of European researchers and SMEs. “Of course we will continue to closely observe trends and new demands to extend and constantly adjust our services accordingly. Our users can look forward to new web-features, more publications and new training items – only to name a few“, Geier casts a glance at the Helpdesk’s plans for this year.
Countries
Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Spain, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, United Kingdom