On May 6, the consultation of Ministry-Municipality Research Cooperation Between SIPO and Shanghai Municipal People’s Government is held in the People’s Tower of Shanghai Municipal Government. Tian Lipu, SIPO Commissioner and Han Zheng, Deputy Secretary General of CPC Shanghai Municipal Committee and Shanghai Mayor, attend the conference and deliver speeches. Zhao Wen, Vice Mayor of Shanghai and Zhou Hanmin, Vice Chairman of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Shanghai Committee also participate in the conference.

Mr. Tian notes that as one of the major regions of China’s economy, culture, foreign trade and international exchanges, Shanghai has excellent environment for IP development with sound IP development basis, high starting points, solid efforts and great achievements. In the past two years, various governmental departments of Shanghai attach great importance to the Ministry-Municipality cooperation and have made outstanding achievements in areas such as perfecting IP management and service system and taking the lead in promoting IP strategy. Mr. Tian says he is deeply impressed by his inspection to Zhangjiang Park of the National IP Pilot Project in the morning of the previous day. Shanghai, the metropolis has close connections with the establishment of IP system in Chinese hinterland and has bright prospects in areas such as talent training, international cooperation and IP protection in the World Expo. SIPO would like to work together with Shanghai Municipal Government for active exploration and bold practice, providing sustainable driving mechanisms and solid systematic supports for independent innovation.

Mr. Han notes that the cooperation between SIPO and Shanghai in the past two years is progressing smoothly and achievements have been made in formulating and implementing IP strategy, constructing the public IP service platform, promoting IP talent education and training, fostering patent exchange market, launching international cooperation and exchanges, constructing the Zhangjiang Park of the National IP Pilot Project and establishing the Shanghai Practice Base of Patent Examiners. Shanghai will further improve its level of IP protection, management and services, stressing on optimizing innovation environment to promote the transformation of innovation achievements, optimizing service environment to lower its service focuses and expand service network, optimizing market environment to promote regular and systematic special rectification activities, optimizing cultural environment to create the atmosphere of respecting and consciously protecting IPR, and optimizing the environment of talent trainings to construct the platform for IP talent training.

Positive progresses have been made during the two years’ cooperation between SIPO and Shanghai Municipal Government. According to the decision made by the conference, in the next-step work, both sides agree in principle to deepen cooperation in six key areas: Strengthening IPR protection in the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, fully improving Shanghai’s service function as the patent information platform, perfecting the supporting and assisting systems of independent intellectual property, raising the experiment and demonstration functions of the national park of IP pilot project, cooperatively training IP special talents and jointly constructing the platform of IP international exchanges and cooperation.