Project Title: Patent Processes and Produres

Leading Office: INPI

Objective: Taking into account the different administrative and examination practices among the five offices, the aim is facilitate the interchange, access and processing of information in order to speed up the analysis increasing the quality of the work done and efficiency of the offices.
Identify technical areas for improvement which can be beneficial for operational purposes in the offices, providing better services for the IP users in each country.

Activities: The initial step is the knowledge of how each office operates in a daily basis, the existing operational constraints and identification of differences in practices and procedures due to each national IP law. In this manner some non-exhaustive topics can be evaluated accordingly and further steps can be pointed out. -
 One main topic is retrieve information for search purposes. As such a good classification structure, including specific databases for specific areas, exchange of information of the documents searched, a good classification system can be of value in order recover the information available. -
 Another point is the search strategy in order to get important documents in a shorter period of time. Also, put the patent documents of each office available for all will result in a better examination report. -
 A third point would be how to access the technical information of each office taking into account the differences in language. A first step to the data access could be done through machine translation. However, other mechanisms to increase the quality of the translated documents must be taken into consideration. In this regard, attention must be paid to each national IP laws relating to document translation. -
 Another point of discussion can be the quality system and how it helps in service provided by each office. -

Main Goal: Increase service quality in the offices providing a better service to IP players in each one of the five country.