Mingji Alfa Intelligent Industrial Technology (Dalian) Co., Ltd. is a small and medium-sized enterprise, mainly engaged in the research and development and manufacturing of industrial robots, fully automatic industrial cleaning equipment, etc. At the end of last year, the head of the company found in the local trading center that Dalian University's open license patents were very consistent with its own technical needs. As a result, the school and the enterprise started scientific research cooperation, and the patents were applied to production, which greatly improved the system performance and created economic value of nearly 10 million yuan for the enterprise within half a year.
In recent years, the number and quality of patents in my country have continued to grow, but the mismatch between results and industrial needs, and the poor cooperation between scientific research institutions and enterprises have seriously restricted the transformation and application of patent results. For example, universities and research institutes have a large number of patents, but the conversion rate has been low for a long time, and many enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, have difficulty finding channels to obtain patents. To improve the industrialization rate of patent results, it is urgent to further open up the bottlenecks in the transformation and application of patents. Among them, patent open licensing is an important institutional innovation.
Patent open licensing is a special patent license newly established in the fourth revision of the Patent Law of the People's Republic of China, and it is also an innovative measure for my country to expand the transformation and application of patents in recent years. The patent owner shall voluntarily submit a patent open license declaration, and the patent license fee shall be "clearly marked". The patent administrative department of the State Council shall "widely publicize" to the whole society. Any unit or individual shall notify the patent owner in writing and pay according to the marked price to obtain an implementation license, and all licensees shall be "treated equally". This system is conducive to improving docking efficiency, reducing institutional transaction costs, and opening up the "last mile" of transforming scientific and technological achievements into real productivity.
The value of intellectual property lies in transformation and application. The implementation of patent open licensing can promote the application and promotion of patent technology. Unlike the previous "one-to-one" licensing method, the "one-to-many" patent open licensing can narrow the gap between supply and demand, amplify the transformation benefits, help to achieve accurate matching of enterprise technology needs with patent databases, and improve the docking efficiency between patent licenses and licensees and the success rate of scientific and technological achievements transformation.
At the same time, the transformation of scientific and technological achievements is a process, which often goes through stages such as technical verification, product development, and market promotion. Patent open licensing can effectively reduce the cost of obtaining patent technology and enhance the risk resistance of licensees.
From a practical point of view, since May 2022, the National Intellectual Property Administration has organized and carried out a pilot program for patent open licensing. By the end of 2023, more than 3,200 patent holders had selected more than 59,000 patent pilot open licenses, which were matched and pushed to more than 110,000 small and medium-sized enterprises, reaching more than 17,000 licensing projects, of which "one-to-many" licenses accounted for more than 40%. This shows that the implementation of patent open licensing is of great significance for promoting industry-university-research cooperation, helping small and medium-sized enterprises to innovate and develop, and promoting the deep integration of scientific and technological innovation and industrial innovation.