Innovation Promotion

WIPO seeks to assist Member States in promoting innovation as a motor of economic development. The following activities contribute to these objectives:

• creating and upgrading innovation support structures and networks and related services and commissioning studies on related issues in cooperation with national authorities;

• providing assistance and long-term training for officials working in the fields of innovation promotion, technology and innovation management and related activities, with the assistance of cooperating institutions both at the national and international levels;

• organizing workshops and training programs on innovation promotion services and their management in order to provide selected officials from developing countries with information on the practical management of innovation support services, of innovation project selection and management, and other various forms of assistance and support in planning innovation project work;

• promoting information sharing among inventors, innovators and inventors' associations through organizing international symposiums on topics related to inventors' activities (see the Directory of Associations of Inventors [PDF]);

• assisting national and international organizers of invention exhibitions in rewarding creative talent through the ongoing development and promotion of WIPO Awards; to promote young ingenuity by offering prizes to young inventors (under 21) in cooperation with national organizers (see WIPO Awards);

• enhancing the importance, advantages and use of the intellectual property system for small and medium enterprises (see http://www.wipo.int/sme/) in their commercial and production activities through the WIPO Trophy for Innovative Enterprises (see General Guiding Principles);

• providing training and assistance for on-line and state-of-the-art searches carried out in patent document collections and on-line databases, in parallel with the provision of patent information services at the request of national authorities or users from developing countries (see WIPO Patent Information Services);

• encouraging the creation of "IP Coordinators" at selected universities through the "WIPO University Initiative" and linking to IP offices to provide researchers, academic staff and students easy access to information on intellectual property in support of their R&D or teaching activities. This program will also address university IP policy and the management of IP assets (see WIPO University Initiative);

• maintaining a Directory of Innovation Centers to facilitate the intellectual property community users to locate innovation support services, structures and centers worldwide.