Recently, the 23rd China Patent Award Selection co-organized by CNIPA and WIPO is under way. Awards include China Patent Gold Award, Silver Award and Excellence Award, as well as China Design Gold Award, Silver Award and Excellence Award, in a bid to encourage and cite those patentees and inventors who contribute significantly to technology (design) innovation and socio-economic development.

The patent gold, silver and excellence awards will be selected from inventions and utility models with the total number of gold awards not exceeding 30 and silver not 60. The design gold, silver and excellence awards will be chosen from designs with gold items not surpassing 10 and silver not 15. The event adopts the way of project recommendation and highlights the principle of high-quality development, giving priority to the core patents in basic research, basic research for application and key and core technological breakthroughs. Relevant departments under the State Council, local intellectual property offices and national industry associations can select and recommend prominent projects to the Award Committee. Since 2021, associations that fail to win prizes in two consecutive sessions of the event will be suspended from the qualification for recommendation for one year.

This year's selection further highlights high-quality development. CNIPA will decrease the number of candidates in areas with serious patent quality problems, and organizations and individuals with a large number (proportion) of abnormal patent applications will be disqualified from application, recommendation, participation or award winning. According to the awards of the recommended projects, CNIPA will select 5-8 winners of the Best Organization Award and 15-20 winners of Excellent Organization Award of China Patent Award, and give the Best Recommendation Award of China Patent Award to academicians whose recommended projects win the China Patent Gold Award.

Previous sessions have witnessed an increasing number of recommended projects, which were all high-quality and created significant social and economic benefits. For example, the 21st China Patent Award last year focused on core technologies in key industries and fields and highlighted the pillaring role of manufacturing industry. Data showed that 62% of the 766 award-winning invention patents were from the emerging sectors of strategic importance, and 83% were from the IP- or patent-intensive industries. 40 of the award-winning projects had created RMB 660 billion yuan of new sales revenue, RMB 62.9 billion yuan of new profits, and RMB 136.3 billion yuan of new amount of exports.(Translated from CNIPA Website Chinese Version)