Jean-Noël Durvy

Acting Director Innovation Policy - DG Enterprise and Industry, European Commission, Brussels

The Commission supports the evolution of the legal framework to make it more user-friendly. This is in particular the objective of the recent patent communication.
However, progresses of the policy reform are slow. The recent years have shown that efforts for harmonisation – such as the Community Patent – struggle to find consensus and appear to face difficulties in overcoming the heterogeneity of objectives of national policy-making.
In the mean time, we have to work with the existing framework.
The focus is thus on practically improving the IPR support for businesses, especially SMEs. One current initiative is, for example, the call for proposals for the new ‘IPR Awareness and Enforcement Project (including IPR Helpdesk)’.
The evolutionary change of the IP system has to be recognized. The societal influences have led to developments such as free software, open source etc.
The four scenarios provide an insight into the possible future influences upon the IP system from different angles. Yet, each scenario only represents one specific dimension - dominated by its main driver. From a policy-maker’s point of view, one has to try to combine the different perspectives and to come to a kind of meeting point.
There are three key dimensions: economic (i.e. globalisation and competitiveness); social; and environmental (i.e. combating climate change) that have to be considered equally from a political and economic perspective.

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