Benchmarking National - PRO INNO Europe

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BENCHMARKING NATIONAL AND REGIONAL SUPPORT SERVICES FOR SMES IN THE FIELD OF INTELLECTUAL AND INDUSTRIAL PROPERTY
� By contrast, the relatively high number of services run by national patent
offices is at first sight astonishing, against the background that the original
task of the patent offices was (is) the handling of patent applications and the
processing of respective filings as a public authority. However, according to
expert opinions, their emergence as service providers may be viewed as a
reaction to the development that the European Patent Office (EPO) has been
taking over more and more tasks of the national offices. National patent offices
find themselves increasingly under pressure to look for new roles and activity
fields or face the prospect of being cut/shut down in the long run. Becoming
a service provider is in this context an obvious option.
Having a service operated by a development agency or a patent office may entail
advantages and disadvantages in either case. Development/technology agencies
are, according to the experts interviewed, generally said to be well known among
SMEs (because of their wide range of services available) and to possess a lot of
business know-how. However, their IPR know-how may often not be well developed,
and they also do not have a track record regarding IPR.
By contrast, due to their history, patent offices have knowledge of IPR – at least
to the extent of patents and the technicalities regarding their administration.
Further on the plus side, patent offices are considered to be reliable and impartial.
On the downside, most experts agree that patent office staff have rather little
business knowledge and may be too much focussed on patents (as implied by the
organisational history). Furthermore, the status of a public authority brings with it
the need to adhere to a certain bureaucracy, which many experts would see in
conflict with customer-orientation. Certain services (such as subsidy services) may,
furthermore, have the potential to harm the impartial character attributed to the
patent office as a public authority.
The lack of evaluation culture, together with the increasing and important role of
national patent offices in IPR service provision for SMEs, suggests that IPR services
are, in terms of investtigated innovation policy instruments, to a large extent
uncharted territory. The main cast of actors in IPR service provision often seems to
be different from that of the more general innovation and R&D support world, the
world of the technology and development agencies. This can be seen as an
example of system fallacy, as the IPR services clearly operate with innovationrelated
goals. This system fallacy is further aggravated, as the subject of proper IP
management and the usage of less formal IP protection methods are hardly tackled
– thus, “blind spots” are created.
5.3.4 Employed resources: Expert staff and budgets as
key issues
High impacts of policy interventions can only be achieved if appropriate resources
are dispatched to tackle the issues surrounding the intervention. The resources
which were investigated in this context comprised available budgets, such as for
subsidising patent applications, and the availability of human resources in sufficient
quality and quantity.
The factor human resources
As regards the number of staff, one can say that a high share of the benchmarked
services is operated only by small teams: 35 % of the staff teams employ at most 3
full time equivalents (FTEs); 18 % see only one FTE in charge. On the premium end,
one can find a few services which employ 80 FTEs or more, comprised mostly of
services which draw on a network of experts or service providers and which have a
small coordinating team at the headquarters. However, services with more than 10
FTEs account for less than 18 % of the benchmarked services. Bearing in mind that
the selected services for benchmarking are presumably among the larger ones
(because of the requirement to be analysable and to have a pool for successfully
interviewing 50 users in the course of the good practice analysis), one can conclude