SMEs told to register intellectual properties

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KUCHING: Small and medium entrepreneurs (SMEs) should make it a priority to properly manage and register their intellectual properties.Assistant Minister in the Chief Minister’s Department Mohd Naroden Majais said most SMEs did not appreciate the need to register their intellectual properties, thus limit their competitive edge.

He stressed yesterday such lackadaisical attitude would result in them not fully benefiting from the commercial values of their intellectual properties and legal implications.

“A study by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) reveals that most Malaysian SME entrepreneurs do not protect their intellectual properties fully,” he said.

Naroden said this when opening the course on intellectual property awareness organised by the Bumiputera Entrepreneur Development Unit of the Chief Minister’s Department and Intellectual Property Corporation of Malaysia (MyIPO) at the State Library.

According to him, among the reasons were that entrepreneurs lacked the knowledge on their intellectual properties and the perception that the intellectual property protection process was complicated, time consuming and incur high cost.

He pointed out that the majority of SMEs gave more importance to physical asset management such as finance and infrastructure to the extent that they neglected non-physical assets such as human capital and knowledge pertaining to ideas, brands, designs and creative works and innovations.

“When your intellectual properties and services are legally protected, the products will get a good place in the market,” he stressed.

He said there were four new intellectual property components that were less known to the public namely, geographical indicators (GI), traditional knowledge, genetic resources and traditional culture.

He, however, said that up to May this year, 77 applications for trademarks and one application each for patent and geographical indicator had been filed at the Sarawak MyIPO office.

Last year, a total of 235 applications for trademarks were approved in the state, a 35.8 per cent increase from the previous year. Six applications for patent, two GIs and two industrial designs were also approved last year, he disclosed.

Present at the function were director of Bumiputera Entrepreneurs Development Unit in the Chief Minister’s Department Sutin Sahmat and MyIPO deputy director (Intellectual Property) Shamsiah Kamaruddin.

source from The Borneo Post