Education Ministry to launch National IP literacy initiative

New Delhi: The Education Ministry will soon launch a National Intellectual Property Literacy initiative and is in talks with some other ministries in this regard, a top official said on Wednesday.

"When we looked at our higher educational institutes, more than 95-97 per cent of our institutes have never filed intellectual property ever, so we felt that if we have to create a culture of IP creation in these institutes we really need to ensure that we make them literate, train, hand-hold them within these institutes," said Dr Abhay Jere, chief innovation officer, Ministry of Education.

He blamed the lack of an ecosystem to take the ideas forward logically and file them as IPs.

"We have more than 10,000 technical institutes and 80 lakh students who are studying technology but unfortunately if you look at the IP filings, it is far below the par as compared to our demographic dividend and what is achieved by our competing countries," Jere said.

Talking about the IP filings in other parts of the world, the ministry official said that around 14 lakh IPs are filed annually in China followed by the US where seven lakh IPs are filed annually and in India, it is somewhere between 45,000-50,000, out of which may be around 30 per cent are by Indians and the remaining by NRIs.

"This needs to change, as we have 80 lakh students just studying technology and overall we have about four crore students who are pursuing higher education, but if you look at the IP which is coming from educational institutions it is not more than 2,000-2,500 and these are getting generated in only top tier I organisations," Jere said while speaking at ASSOCHAM's 2nd IP Conclave and IPTSE Awards 2020.

Noting that the New Education Policy is making some radical changes, he said, "We are now coming up with a national research foundation which is in line with the National Science Foundation in the US to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in a right way in our educational institutes."

Another important initiative, he said which the government has brought in and which is currently being hammered a lot in a large number of educational institutes is the National Startup Policy for faculty and students.

"We have conceptualised this national innovation and startup policy because what we realised is that we have no clear incentivisation for faculties and students who get into IP filing, entrepreneurship, converting those IPs into ventures, conversion of knowledge into wealth was not there," he said, adding that the ministry is working with a number of universities and higher education institutes so that they can adopt these policies.

He informed that "Last week we trained about 1,500 faculties because to maintain IPs we need to ensure whether monetisation of IP is high which brings an intrinsic motivation for faculties and students to go ahead and pursue this path, so we have made major recommendations in this regard. One of the recommendations is that the institute or the university needs to budget heavily for IP filing."

Talking about another initiative by the Education Ministry, he said that to ensure that IP filing goes up they are training faculties as innovation ambassadors.

"Till date, we have trained about 6,000 faculties and when we are training them, one of the modules of the training is IP filing, management and how we can get it monetised," he added.