Role of Intellectual Property Rights from Innovations to Start-ups

School of Medical and Allied Sciences G D Goenka University coordinated a webinar entitled “Role of Intellectual Property Rights from Innovations to Start-ups” on 23th July 2021. The speaker for the webinar was Mr. Vivek Singh, IP Attorney and Head, IP Prosecution practice, Sagacious IP, Gurugram, India. This webinar was organized with the reason to create awareness of importance of patents, trademarks, trade secrets, copyrights and designs for protecting innovations as well as initiating new start-up ventures, for recouping the time and capital invested in research and development, as well as protecting any business or company from economic disadvantage. 

Mr. Vivek Singh provided detailed information about what can be patented, the importance of trademarks and trade secrets in ensuring significant brand presence and market share towards economic advantage. He elaborated different examples of trademarks and trade secrets in the pharmaceutical drug products and fast-moving consumer goods domain as well as different machine designs that have been protected by innovators like apple, LG, Siemens and Nokia through Intellectual property rights. He emphasised the importance of trademark registration for pharmaceutical product brands and why it has significant advantage over patent filings, since while the shelf life of a patent is 20 years from the date of filing and is indispensable for pharmaceutical innovator company to compensate millions of dollars invested over 10 to 15 years during innovation to establish safety and efficacy of a lead molecule, trademarks are granted by government forever, provided that they are renewed after every ten years. He elaborated the advantages and disadvantages between patents and trademarks. The webinar ended with interesting question and answer session and Mr. Vivek suitably answered the queries to satisfaction. At the end of the webinar, he said that he would be happy to assist in any new start ups and patent and trademark filing ventures.