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Korea Industrial Technology Association comes

July 23 and August 20, some members of the Korea Industrial Technology Association (KOITA) visited JIPA. The former came to us as a part of prize trip for winners of “Employees’ Invention Comic Contest”, the latter visited us to conducted hearing for Japanese Employees’ Invention System.

KOITA was established as a non-profitable organization under the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of Korea in 1979. Their aims are to support and promote R & D activities of the Korean private enterprise and main activities are to deliver customized technology management educational programs to CEOs and CTOs of Korean companies in collaboration with foreign universities, to certificate R&D center of private companies, and to award prizes for excellent researchers and so on.

“Employees’ Invention Comic Contest” was held with the aim for enlightening people via comic about employees’ invention). The very best award was “Blue LED” (work of a university professor), the best awards are “Whitening tooth paste “CLAREN”” (work of two university students) and “mobile text-messaging input method” (work of a university student). The four had much interest in Japanese digital contents protection and academia-business collaboration. JIPA explained current situation of these and was questioned on the issues.

On the employees’ invention system hearing, KOITA’s question was concentrate only on Japanese company’s response on revised section 35 of Patent Law. Because Korean government advocates encouraging employees’ invention as a policy in order to promoting innovation.

In response, JIPA explained activities of Japanese companies and universities against the system based on two questionnaire results, the one was conducted JIPA in 2005 and the other was made by JPO in 2006 as a trailblazer of the issue.

[Update 2009-08-20 ]