Peruvian inventors may reduce almost by half the time required for patenting their inventions

By Francisco Espinosa Reboa, Francisco Espinosa Bellido

This service is directed mostly to national inventors which have no experience drafting and filing patents and who because of that are constantly required during the prosecution of their patent application to meet several formal or substantial requirements, or their applications are rejected for lack of clarity on the description of the invention.
 
With “Fast Patent” they will receive a personalized assistance by INDECOPI from the start of the application procedure, and may be able to file an application which will not generate official actions and that will reduce significantly the current time it takes to obtain a patent, which is close to 39 months in average. This average time, however, is still better than the regional average, which is between 4 and 5 years.
 
INDECOPI believes that this system will be able to reduce the patent prosecution time to close to 22 months, as it was the case in a recent local patent application case that was presented as model for this new service.
 
This system is part of the efforts by INDECOPI to promote a culture of inventive among Peruvian citizens and companies, and to try to increase the ratio of national patents compared to foreign patents, which are substantially larger in number. For this INDECOPI has created the “Sub Direction of support for Innovation”.
 
During 2011 and until May 2012 only 61 “Peruvian patents” were filed, while 1,589 “foreign patents” were filed. During that same period, only 14 “Peruvian patents” were granted while 547 “foreign patents” were granted.
 
The contrary happens with utility models, which are new shapes, configurations, or arrangement of components of any device, tool, implement, mechanism or other object, or any part thereof, that permits improved or different operation, use, or manufacture of the object incorporating it, or that endows it with any utility, advantage, or technical effect that it did not have previously. During that same time span 111 “Peruvian utility models” were filed but only 15 “foreign utility models”. Also, 51 “Peruvian utility models” were granted but only 15 “foreign utility models” were granted.
 
This clearly shows that most of the current Peruvian innovation is being directed towards improving existing technology or its use, but not towards generating truly innovative and patentable new technology. Hopefully, these kinds of initiatives may help improve that situation in the future.