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Reference is made to the request made by Ms. Nuntawan Sakuntanaga, Director General (DG), Department of IP (DIP), Thailand, regarding the conduct of IP office diagnostics (with special focus on patent and trademark registries which have more issues and challenges than other units in DIP) with a view to improve efficiency and effectiveness. This letter was the confirmation of outcome of the discussion between DG Nuntawan and the ASPAC Bureau on this specific subject matter on the sidelines of the WIPO General Assemblies in October 2015. As such, the proposed activity is one of the priority areas under the IP Roadmap for Thailand and it is part of the work plan of the Bureau for 2016.
Many of the IP offices today (including DIP Thailand) are facing a number of major operational and management challenges. Generally speaking, they are: (i) increasing workloads and growing backlogs of applications; (ii) lack of skilled and competent human resources; (iii) adopting appropriate systems and processes to enable them to keep pace with rapid developments in technologies, while adapting to evolving systems and standards that are aligned with international standards (e.g. PCT, Madrid, Hague, WIPO Standards, etc.); and (iv) moving towards management models which are based on greater financial self-sufficiency and administrative autonomy in order to meet effectively the foregoing challenges. A number of IP offices in Asia and the Pacific region have expressed their keen interest in undertaking such diagnostics in cooperation with WIPO so as to have a clear “road map” for improving their efficiency in service delivery and modernizing their management models.
As such, the Bureau has made the IP office diagnostics as one of its priority areas for 2016-2017. Accordingly, preliminary discussions were held with the interested IP offices in the region as well as with potential experts who are qualified and have necessary experiences to do the work. One of the key experts that |