Source: China Daily

Shanghai has established a closer connection with the global community to improve its performance in intellectual property protection, education and transaction.

Tongji University, a leading Chinese university, established the Shanghai International College of Intellectual Property in November 2016 based on a memorandum of understanding signed between the World Intellectual Property Organization and the Shanghai municipal government two years earlier.

The two sides agreed in the memorandum that the WIPO Academy would strengthen cooperation with Shanghai to carry out long-distance education on IP, provide postgraduate programs on patent law and launch IP master's degrees to serve inventors, business executives and professionals, said Shan Xiaoguang, dean of the college.

"Tongji University is the first and the only university in China to develop a joint-master's degree program in cooperation with WIPO," Shan said.

The program, which requires at least one year of working experience in the IP sector, received 57 applications from 30 countries and regions and finally recruited a total of 25 people, including 16 Chinese students, for its first session.

The university is also the first in China to undertake the Belt and Road Master Degree Program in IP, Shan said.

Also starting in September 2017, the program recruited 11 students from Belt and Road countries and regions.

"The programs are getting popular among international students as we received more applications this year. We arranged quite a lot of field studies for the students to help them understand the status quo of China's IP sector," he noted.

The IP discipline of Tongji has helped to maintain a long-term relationship with many foreign academies and institutes of the sector.

Its overseas partners include Germany's Humboldt University and the Max Planck Institute of Konstanz, Italy's Turin Polytechnic University, the United States' George Washington University and the Russian Federal Institute of Industrial Property, according to Shan.

"We observed that China is accelerating the exchanges with other countries in the field of IP, while a decade ago we were still at the stage of learning from the developed countries," Shan said.

Qiu Yizhong, director of the board of Shanghai Intellectual Property Exchange, said that global business is on the rise. The exchange was established by Shanghai United Assets and Equity Exchange in January 2017.

As of July, more than 1,100 international projects on technology property and equity transactions were listed on the international section of the exchange, Qiu said.

Some 2,300 domestic projects were also listed, of which 72 made deals with an aggregate transaction of 323 million yuan ($47.64 million).

"The global business, which was operated by our parent company since 2010, is getting active especially from the Asia-Pacific region. By comparison, the domestic market needs more education," Qiu said.