Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have long been the main focus of the Austrian Patent Office. That is why we have designed our international search facility serv.ip precisely for the needs of this group. Already in 2007, our customer portal was highlighted in an evaluation by the EU Commission amongst 280 service facilities (see Annual Report 2007). And again in 2008, we are able to book another big success: the EU Commission considered our non-bureaucratic CEE project CETMOS as being worth an award. Within the scope of the European Charter for Small Enterprises, CETMOS was elected as one of only three “Charter Stars” throughout Europe. This gives us great pleasure, especially if you look at the reason: CETMOS, so the EU Commission, is a cooperation that works well across and beyond national borders and thus connects the relevant aspects of internationalisation and the reduction of bureaucratic obstacles for SMEs in an exemplary manner.
Innovation management is not only a catchphrase for the Austrian Patent Office. In modern business, the systematic search for and development of new products and services is the key to success and requires strategic planning. Unlike the “big players”, however, SMEs usually lack the human and financial resources for professional innovation management. And this is where we can help. With serv.ip, the Austrian Patent Office has a search system tailored specifically to the needs of SMEs, and highly qualified staff members deal with your search requests. We provide comprehensive services, right from the start of your search activities, allowing you to obtain the latest search status as early as possible and thus saving you time - and a lot of money. After all, which entrepreneur has the time and energy to search through millions of patent documents worldwide? With our search we can support you in your decision-making and selection of trailblazing projects, thus guaranteeing your business success.
Our range of services in the area of patent and trademark searches are naturally directed at all companies, regardless of their size. Nevertheless, experience has shown that large corporations have a tendency to be able to handle the excessive amount of information available in this sector better than others. Small and medium-sized businesses and individual inventors cannot deal with all the procedural stages themselves, however. To strengthen the economic structure of Austria, our focus is therefore set on the many innovative and flexible companies in this category in Austria, and for them we offer our own tailor-made information events.
Experience has shown that there is an urgent need for raising the awareness of industrial property among European small and medium-sized businesses. Japanese and US companies in this category show a far higher degree of acceptance and greater knowledge with regard to commercial protective rights, and that means they are often able to succeed better on an international level as well.
Another target group for our Service Centre is of course that of the universities and technical colleges, as centres for research and development.
The idea is simple: instead of sending national companies to the various countries of Eastern Europe and leaving them up to their own fate with regard to trademark laws, as before, companies can now organise ONE common search in currently nine countries (Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Slovenia) at a mouse-click using a simple form on the Internet platform www.cetmos.eu. The complicated process is dealt with by the patent offices in Hungary and Austria. The company will receive the result within four to six weeks. This is a significant facilitation, in particular for SMEs, which in 2008 was even considered by the EU Commission to be worth a special award: within the scope of the European Charter for Small Enterprises, CETMOS was elected as one of only three “Charter Stars” throughout Europe. The reason: CETMOS is a cooperation that works well across and beyond national borders and thus connects the relevant aspects of internationalisation and the reduction of bureaucratic obstacles for SMEs in an exemplary manner.
This award encourages us of course and is equally an incentive to gain even more countries from the CEE area for the cooperation, jointly with our partners, so as to raise the attractiveness of CETMOS for the economy even further.
The experts at the Austrian Patent Office help Austrian companies, especially SMEs, to avoid stranded investments. Our service centre serv.ip offers comprehensive advice on how you can make your research and development more efficient. So far, European business have been investing an incredible € 60.000.000.000 per year in unnecessary failures. For all those who do not want to count the zeros: That is 60 billion (!) euros. These investments were failures because all the work had already been done before and the inventions had already been made.
That does not have to be so: With our express search tool for the state of the art, which is conducted in accordance with Patent Cooperation Treaty rules (PCT), you obtain a valuable basis for solving technical problems within just four weeks. And it can also be used to evaluate innovations, assess the current market situation, or estimate future market developments.
More than 2000 searches conducted by us annually for your technical problems are proof of both our competence and the importance of timely and specific information.
The expansion of our service centre has already paid dividends for the Austrian economy by helping to avoid the unnecessary and costly duplication of inventions at home, and this was indeed the aim of serv.ip. What no one could foresee, however, was that serv.ip has also attracted significant international attention. After being in operation for just a few years, serv.ip is now being used all over the world. Since 2007 our serv.ip staff have been conducting searches for possible duplicate developments for Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Croatia, Turkey, Slovenia and San Marino. We are naturally delighted with this international recognition, which confirms the pioneering role played by Austria in the field of industrial property protection.
In 2008, we developed a series of additional tailor-made services for you in the area of inventions. Our top products are still the express search for the state of the art and our express expertises, which are available to you after four weeks at the latest. To meet your needs, we have extended our product catalogue by the “Detailed Search on an Area of Technology” and the “Search an Expert opinion on Legal Validity”. With the “Detailed Search on an Area of Technology”, you will receive an up-to-date overview of the worldwide developments on patents and utility models in your line of business, obtain an exact monitoring of your competitors’ performances, as well as find new cooperation partners or receive ideas for new development projects. Our “Search and Expertise on Legal Validity” service is of high relevance in the case of nullity or opposition procedures mainly, but also in advance of any patent application: It provides an extra in legal security and goes beyond the information on the state of the art.
Person- or company-specific searches are also possible, by the way. If you are looking for the patents and utility models of a specific proprietor, we can deliver them within the scope of the detailed written information
The trademark sector is particularly prone to legal disputes because of the similarities between trademarks. We can also give you security in this sector too, before you embark on the often expensive process of developing a trademark. The similarity search provides you not only with an overview of word-identical trademarks, but also searches for word and picture trademarks that are potentially prone to confusion. In 2008, we extended our product range massively. And our highlight thereby: the so-called ranking .
Thereby, the trademark similarity search is revised by us again, especially for you. Trademarks that are particularly similar and therefore potentially riskier are highlighted clearly and summarised in a transparent manner in a separate table at the beginning of the search report. This way, you will not only receive an overview, but also a hit list trimmed to your needs.
For trademark searches in the CEE area, you can start a search in nine countries using CETMOS ( Central European Trade Mark Observation Service ).
Person- or company-specific searches are also possible. If you are looking for the patents and designs of a specific proprietor, we can deliver them within the scope of the proprietor search .
In the USA this serv.ip offer is neatly referred to as opposition search. But what does opposition search, or, more precisely, market research, really mean? Our Service Centre will carry out for you periodic and precise monitoring of your trademark with regard to matters of commercial legal protection. With our regular patent monitoring, you will receive continuous information about which innovations your major competitors or potential cooperation partners are making in your area of technology.
If you wish to monitor the trademark market on an ongoing basis, then the competitor monitoring is to be recommended: In this case, the desired market environment is examined periodically.
If you wish to receive an overview of any possible property rights of a proprietor, use our overview of property rights.
This means that our comprehensive search services will keep you up to date all the time on where the competition is, and what developments in the sector need to be watched in particular.
The problem is known: especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are often provided with a great potential, but not with the resources required to correctly estimate or exploit the market potential. And that is where a service introduced in 2008 by the Austrian Patent Office (ÖPA) together with aws - austria wirtschaftsservice (Austrian economic service) provides a remedy. This help service for technically-oriented SMEs in Austria is supported by the European Patent Office. The initiative is called discover.ip and offers companies a valuable analysis of potentials: the efficient use of company-internal intellectual property (in short: IP) is not a simple matter, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. In many cases, the risks and sources of know-how dispersion are underestimated. Equally, however, the opportunities and the use of strategic mechanisms of protection remain undiscovered. This is where the Patent Office and aws come in: specialists of the two service providers visit your company and assess the opportunities and risks of your business model together with you for a comprehensive profile of weaknesses and strengths. All aspects of your corporate IP are gathered in one report, which is meant to provide a good basis for your future strategic orientation. This way, you will receive an overview of the opportunities in matters related to the protection of intellectual property in your company. And the best part of it is: discover.ip is free of charge for you.
This is one of the most difficult issues in the case of protecting intellectual property: what will be the value of a special patent? In 2008, the Patent Office took a major step in the direction of patent valuation for Austrian SMEs: With IPscore, a software developed by the Danish Patent Office in cooperation with economic experts and developed further by the European Patent Office, SMEs can now be supported in their innovation management.
If you wish to know whether it is worth investing in an invention, we assist you with your questions in relation to the use of the IPscore programme. Based on a catalogue of questions by IPscore to be answered by you, the opportunities and risks of an innovation or strengths and weaknesses of a technology are determined.
We wish to support you as an Austrian SME and create the foundations for innovation-related decisions as well as the next steps together with you. For this purpose, we will demonstrate the IPscore software to you and give you our recommendations as the service point of the Austrian Patent Office.