EPO and Ukrpatent sign Reinforced Partnership

21. Juli 2022

The EPO and the State Enterprise Ukrainian
Intellectual Property Institute (Ukrpatent) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on a Reinforced Partnership (RP)
agreement. EPO President
António Campinos and Andrew Kudin, Ukrapatent Director General, concluded the
agreement at the margin of the WIPO general assembly in Geneva on 19 July 2022.
The MoU is a fixed term agreement that will run over a two-year period. With this signature, the EPO intensifies
mobilisation of its resources to support Ukrpatent’s staff and its functioning
as an IP office.

The MoU follows several joint initiatives discussed at the
organisations‘ previous meetings held earlier in 2022. These include staff secondments,
grants for Ukrpatent staff and Ukrainian researchers, extensive European Patent
Academy training, access to continuous online learning, access to EPO patent
databases and data services, and support for Ukrainian innovators through the
EPO PATLIB 2.0 project.

During the Geneva meeting, the EPO extended additional
support measures. President Campinos officially invited nine Ukrpatent
staff members to a three-week internship programme at the Office, starting on
August 29. The EPO also shared two of its bulk patent data sets with the
Ukrainian delegation: EP bibliographic data and EP full-text entries. These
sets are bulk extractions from the EPO’s internal patent databases and are made
available to external users for further processing.

The RP is a strategic agreement based on a shared vision: the
further development of the patent system as a catalyst for innovation,
technology transfer and economic growth. Search and examination work products
form the central pillar of the RP scheme, and over the course of an agreement,
the EPO and its partners work towards standardised utilisation of EPO search
and examination results.