NIPC News

Department for Science, Innovation and Technology Author bryan...   Licence CC BY-SA 2.0   Source Wikimedia Commons Jane Lambert   In Patents: a New Resource Hub on Standard Essential Patents in May and HMG's other Proposals on FRAND Licensing ,  I wrote on 5 March 2025: "A standard essential patent ("SEP") is a patent that has to be worked in order to comply with a technical standard. Organizations that set such standards (known as standards-setting organizations or SSOs) require SEP proprietors to promise to license the use of their patents to businesses that want to make or distribute products that comply with those standards ("implementers") on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory ("FRAND") terms as a condition for including their patents within the standards." I added that in theory such a condition looks very fair and ought to work very well but in many cases it doesn't.  That is because implementers delay paying fees until a c...

  Jane Lambert About 30 years ago, I attended a workshop on the arbitration of intellectual property disputes. The speakers included  Dr Francis Gurry  and His Honour Peter Ford.  At that time, Dr Gurry was an Australian academic who had written a rather good book on the law of confidence . He went on to become Director-General of the WIPO. Peter Ford was the first judge of the Patents County Court which was the predecessor to the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court ("IPEC"). Two alternative dispute resolution services were set up as a result of that workshop.  One was an arbitration and mediation panel attached to the Patents County Court under the leadership of Prof. Bryan Niblett.  I was a founder member.   I am not sure whether we ever had a case,  Certainly, nothing was referred to me and the panel was disbanded after a few years.   The other was the World Intellectual Property Organization ("WIPO") Arbitration and Mediation...

European Patent Office Author  Kārlis Dambrāns Licence CC BY-SA 2.0   Source Wikimedia Commons   Jane Lambert In IPO Consultation on SEPs and Innovation , I mentioned the Intellectual Property Office's open consultation on SEPs and innovation and issued a call for views  on 19 Dec 2021. The responses to that consultation appear in  Standard Essential Patents and Innovation: Summary of Responses to the Call for Views  which was updated on 5# July 2023.   On 21 March 2023, the IPO published a  questionnaire on standard essential patents ("SEPs") for SME small-cap and mid-cap businesses.  which I discussed in IPO Consults on SEP Licensing   on 24 March 2023.  The IPO received 47 responses to that questionnaire including one from me.  It published the outcome of the consultation on 5 July 2023 (see  SEPs questionnaire for SME, small-cap and mid-cap businesses: Summary of Response ).  It intends to consider the r...

Jane Lambert On 28 April 2022, the European Patent Office and the European Investment Office published a joint report entitled  Deep tech innovation in smart connected technologies A comparative analysis of SMEs in Europe and the United States April 2022 .  Although the report contained a lot of positive findings, the headline of the EPO's news item was decidedly gloomy: "Despite impressive patent activity, Europe’s small deep tech businesses lag behind their US counterparts." Part of the reason for the gloom is that report focused on the EU rather than Europe as a whole. Consequently, it missed the fact that the UK has almost 1,000 small and medium-sized enterprises developing 4IR technologies (nearly twice as many as Germany with 570 and nearly two and a half times as many as France with 400) and that London hosts one of the top clusters of such businesses (see page 30 and the map on page 29 of the main report). It would have been interesting to know the reasons for t...

Jane Lambert The State of Small Business: Putting UK entrepreneurs on the map   , which was compiled by Nesta (the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts)  in collaboration with The Sage Group  Plc , is a data-led guide to the state of small and medium enterprises ("SME") in the UK.  It is accompanied by a website called "The State of Small Business"   which provides detailed information about how such businesses are performing and changing in each area. The authors hope that decision-makers will take advantage of the data to understand their local business environments and thereby assist them to drive growth and productivity locally and nationally. The authors' recommendations to central government and other national policy makers are to:- Know that the productivity puzzle must be solved at a local level, Devolve capacity, not just powers,  Hold local authorities and devolved areas to account, Simplify busin...

Jane Lambert In November 2010, a few months after it had assumed office, the Coalition Government commissioned Prof. Ian Hargreaves  to review how the intellectual property framework supports growth and innovation. His terms of reference  expressly included "the cost and complexity to SMEs of accessing IP services to help them to protect and exploit IP". At para 9.2 of his report,  Digital Opportunity A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth , which   Hargreaves presented in May 2011, he identified "gaps in IP knowledge among SMEs and gaps in IP services available to them" which impaired the "ability of young and innovative UK firms to realise the potential value of IP".  That mattered, according to Hargreaves "because of the growing importance of smaller IP intensive firms to future growth."  Hargreaves found that the reason for those gaps was that current service provision was not configured as well as it could have been to ...

Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Photo Homelka Source Wikipedia Creative Commons Licence Jane Lambert The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has recently published  Business incubators and accelerators: the national picture , a research paper for the Department   written by Jonathan Bone, Olivia Allen and Christopher Haley of NESTA  and a national directory of business incubators and accelerators . The authors have identified 205 incubators and 163 accelerators in the UK supporting around 3,450 and 3,660 businesses a year respectively. Incubators are to be found throughout the UK but the regions with the highest proportion to the number of businesses are to be found in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Over half of all accelerators are in London though the highest concentration of accelerators to the number of businesses is to be found in Scotland. As I specialize in advising and acting f...