Ideas seldom enter the world fully ripened. Like budding plants or growing children, they need light, nutrition, care and devotion in order to flourish. In art, architecture, design, technology or science, creative minds around the world come up with new ideas every day. There are more or less no limits for them and they span a broad spectrum. They range from artificial intelligence and fashion to agriculture, from renewable energies to retail, from television to tourism and from virtual reality to video games. Ideas are also what created millions of small- and medium-sized enterprises, after taking shape in someone’s mind and breaking through to the market. If an idea is cared for and enriched with ingenuity, know-how and flair, it becomes intellectual property with the potential to drive business development, economic growth and human progress.
“IP & SMEs: Taking your ideas to market” is the motto of this year’s World Intellectual Property Day, to take place on 26 April with a focus this time on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The term intellectual property, or IP, refers to the rights of ownership of things created by human intellect, like inventions, knowledge and software. Intellectual property can be protected with legal instruments such as industrial property rights, patents and utility models.
World IP Day is celebrated across the world and everyone – be they patent or trade mark registries, universities or non-governmental organisations – is invited to mark the occasion. Events will also be held by the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt, DPMA), a centre of competence for all industrial property rights for IP. In conjunction with Germany’s Patent Information Centres, it is offering various virtual events on the topic of IP protection. On Monday, 26 April 2021, from 11.00 a.m. to 12.30 p.m., for instance, it will be partnering with IDZ Berlin in holding an online seminar (in German on Webex, registration by email to: events.berlin@dpma.de) on the subject of industrial property rights in Germany and DPMA in times of change.
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