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Thursday Jul 08, 2010

Coming Soon: Draft USPTO 2010-2015 Strategic Plan

Blog by Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO David Kappos

I’m writing today about a major challenge and opportunity for the USPTO—and for the entire IP community.

In the coming days we will be releasing, for employee and public comment, the Draft 2010-2015 USPTO Strategic Plan.

Today, I’m asking the entire IP community to invest in the formulation of this plan.

The draft plan sets out the USPTO’s mission-focused strategic goals: optimize patent quality and timeliness; optimize trademark quality and timeliness; and provide global and domestic leadership to improve IP policy, protection, and enforcement worldwide.

The plan identifies the objectives we believe are necessary to achieve the strategic goals and sets out the projects, initiatives, and programs we’ll use to get there.

The objectives are:

Provide timely examination of patent applications. Reduce the time to first office action on the merits for patent applications to 10 months, and average total pendency to 20 months
Improve quality of patent and trademark examination
Improve/enhance patent appeal and post-grant processes
Optimize trademark quality and maintain pendency
Demonstrate global leadership in all aspects of IP policy development
Improve IT infrastructure and tools
Implement a sustainable funding model for operations
Improve relations with employees and stakeholders

In the weeks, months, and years to come, we’re counting on USPTO employees and the IP community to unite around the strategic plan. We all need to believe in this plan in order to properly execute it. That’s why I want the plan to reflect the values and knowledge of the entire IP community—that includes the ideas of our employees, public stakeholders, and USPTO management.

We invite your comments, your questions, and your suggestions for improvement to help us refine our Strategic Plan.

Our success will ensure that the USPTO and the American IP system continue to fuel the U.S. economy and job growth by spurring innovation, creativity and ingenuity.

Please stay tuned for the release of the draft plan in the coming days. We look forward to your feedback on it.

Posted at 05:49AM Jul 08, 2010 in ip | Comments[4]

Comments:

I hope this strategic plan will really work out to speed up timely examination of patent applications ultimately leading to the public and the corporate satisfaction who keep on waiting for a long time for a response towards their filed patent applications. I do hope the draft plan will be implemented as soon as possible....

Posted by Amit Agrawal on July 08, 2010 at 07:00 AM EDT #

why is hard to make patent of my idea? To many obtacle to patent an idea To patent an idea like impossible to many requirement to patent my good idea. I don't know who to turn too. You don't know anybody to help you or guide you to patent your idea the lawyer or attorney are to expensive for a patent if you don't have money, you cannot hire one. this just for individual inventor I hope it would be easy to patent for an idea for individual inventors. I believe my idea is very useful for everbody.

Posted by MARIZA ROUHANA on July 18, 2010 at 04:53 PM EDT #

Dear Mr Kappos, It would be really helpful to inventors, and I think it would also significantly improve the quality of patent submissions, if the USPTO search engines recognised the indented structure of the US patent classification system. For example, if I search on CCL/60/272, the current engines do not find all the patents in the indented subgroups under 60/272. Consequently, it is necessary to search each one of them individually, and there are many. Please believe me; it is a very time consuming and very frustrating process. As the structure already exists within the classification system, surely the seach engines could be modified to recognize it. This would also add a tremendous amount of value to the classification system. I have also noticed that some applications seem to be placed in the most obscure classes possible. I suspect this may be deliberate obfuscation on the part of certain corporations. The above modification of the engines would tend to counter such behavior, should it exist. Please let me know if I can provide any additional information or help on the above.

Posted by Andrew Barrowman on July 22, 2010 at 09:58 PM EDT #

I really appreciate this site. It has enabled me to travel through the right path. I AM AN INVENTOR because of you all.

Posted by Joey Ugochukwu Ofili on October 22, 2010 at 02:06 PM EDT #