Europe plays innovation catch-up
Published: 07 Dec 2005 12:05 GMT
...Commission's view is that we should strengthen IPR in Europe. Many people say that patenting is too easy in America, but too difficult in Europe. We need to find the right balance.
It would help if it were easier to register European patents, but we also have to re-examine the whole IPR concept, to see where most existing approaches are more appropriate for mature industries than for new technologies. What makes this such a difficult problem to solve is that development in areas such as ICT is so rapid. Something that may be worth patenting today will probably be outdated in four or five years' time.
A European approach to the patent question will be helpful but we need to strike the balance between the American and European approaches, between protecting too much and too little. Industry is demanding more protection for being prepared to take the risks involved in developing new products and services.
Should the EC be backing moves towards the establishment of institutions fostering a more open market in intellectual property and thus facilitating the effective sharing of IP in a way that will add more value to an innovation?
The development of a market for intellectual property in Europe has been discussed but there is currently no proposal on the table. However, we are looking at ways of helping this, such as making companies licence a patent that they are not using. It is an important discussion and it is something that will be developed. We see too much of what might be called "defensive patenting" that is primarily aimed at preventing development rather than something that they want to use. That was never the intention with patents. They were intended to give the holder the opportunity to exploit the idea or discovery. It is a healthy debate but we have not yet come to a conclusion that we all agree upon.
Is the fact that there are too many different and often competing regimes within the EU governing the development of a technology in a national interest rather than a European one a problem?
Yes it is true, sometimes you have the feeling that people think that the single market is now complete and so they wonder why it does not actually deliver more than it does. The truth is that far less than half of GDP is open for competition. The rest is protected somehow and this has to be changed. We have made a start. For example, the other day we got an agreement to open up defence procurement all over Europe. This is still a voluntary thing, but the expectation is that virtually all countries will follow it.
The draft EU Directive on Services aims to open up some of these closed markets. There is some progress here, and it looks like there will be a compromise in the European Parliament that will allow us to move it forward — maybe not as far as the Commission would have liked, but at least a step in the right direction.
Is the EC making any moves towards promoting the development of EU-wide standards for new technology components and systems thus ensuring the existence of a sufficiently large market for them?
We will see a greater degree of European-inspired standardisation in new technology components and systems. We are already encouraging industry to create EU-wide bodies that can support standardisation.
Public technology procurement can also be used as a way of encouraging standardisation. If we can get this on a European level and buyers can agree on what they want, this can give rise to an automatic standardisation that would be extremely beneficial for a number of these areas. This is however something that is still being debated and that we are pushing for but we have yet to convince the various stakeholders. There is a growing consensus that this is important in creating an innovative advanced technology Europe.
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