A focused intellectual property area in Beijing is fully mature after about two year's development and aims to be a site where IP is well respected and used, said Wang Ying, IP chief in Haidian district.

Officials in Beijing and Haidian unveiled the area's nameplate on Sunday at the opening ceremony of the 2015 Zhongguancun Innovation & Entrepreneurship Festival.

"We officially publicized the scope and orientation of the area at the ceremony," said Wang, adding that the site, known as IP and Standardization Street, would now begin a new journey.

The area is home to more than 700 IP service organizations that offer wide-ranging IP services including information consultation, lawsuits, operation, collateral financing and assessment.

It is in the heart of Zhongguancun Science Park and has three clusters: the Zhongguancun IP buildings, a building in Beihang University and the China International Technology Transfer Center.

The area aims to become a leading site in China in terms of IP service and an active area of technology transfer and industrialization, Wang said.

She said the area has achieved several innovative results since 2014.

Beijing East Linden Science and Technology Co signed a contract in April this year to sell its World Traditional Medicine Patent Database to the Intellectual Property Corp of Malaysia.

Wang said this would be the first time a patent database produced in Beijing had been sold abroad.

Liu Yanhuai, chairwoman of Beijing East Linden, said STN, a Germany-based online database service, also bought almost all the data from the medicine patent database.

The database includes patent information dating back to 1985 about natural medicine and its extracts from more than 20 countries, regions and international organizations.

Liu said the database in Chinese and English made it possible to do searches such as chemical structure retrieval and synonym retrieval.

"The World Traditional Medicine Patent Database is actually an entry point for us to professionally process the world's patent literature and build databases," Liu said.

Her company is now busy with data processing in other health fields including biological medicine, farm chemicals and medical equipment.

Wang said the area is fostering companies to build IP databases in different fields, such as chemistry and the Internet.

She said, "By doing so, China's main sectors will have authoritative databases in three to five years, which will help reduce the cost of scientific research."

The IP area set up China's first IP operation fund in April, 2014, according to Wang.

The fund aimed to help domestic high-tech companies obtain patents of core technologies and would further activate China's technological trade market, the website of national IP authority said.

"We are preparing to help build more such funds," Wang said.

She said the funds will have different focuses, such as IP authorization and transfer and IP insurance. Others may center on certain industries.

The IP area is also attractive to foreign organizations. Germany-based Steinbeis, a provider of technology transfer, has applied to register a company in the area, according to Qin Yan, Steinbeis' chief representative in China.

Qin said the company chose to set up in the area because Zhongguancun has advantages of skilled professionals and a scientific research foundation.

"We always believe that intellectual property rights are merely pieces of paper and professionals are essential to make IP or technologies become commodities and make money," Qin said.

She said the new company jointly founded with the Chinese Academy of Sciences would commercialize domestic and foreign IP and provide it, as well as skilled professionals, to small and medium-sized companies in China.

"We particularly expect the IP area will develop very well and play a leading role in IP creation, protection and international cooperation on science and technology," Qin said.

Wang said although the area has had positive results, it still has a lot of IP-related work to do as China's IP development remains mostly passive and follows other countries.

The area plans to bring in more international IP service agencies and become a display area for international IP communication, and further support technological innovation in Beijing, Wang said.

The 2015 Zhongguancun Innovation & Entrepreneurship Festival is a 20-day event. It includes keynote speeches, seminars, scientific and technological competitions and road shows.

songmengxing@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 10/14/2015 page17)