Quality Alchemist (品質煉金術師): HKSQ AGM 2014 and IP Audit Seminar

A seminar named " Why an innovation-based business should consider IP audit? " was organized by Hong Kong Society for Quality (HKSQ) after HKSQ Annual General Meeting (AGM) on 25 July 2014. I would like to share both HKSQ AGM 2014 and Seminar below.

Mr. Karson Chui (Chairman, HKSQ) held the meeting and briefed the Chairman report to all members. Until now, HKSQ has 396 individual members, 6 student members and 12 corporate members (by invitation only). Then Karson reviewed HKSQ activities in last year.

After that our Hon. Treasurer Mr. CP Chow presented HKSQ financial status in the official report on 2011/2012 and 2012/2013, as well as, unaudited report on 2013/2014. Ms. Minda Chiang (Hon. Secretary) reported all participants tonight and AGM agenda. The nominations of Office Bearers in 2014/2015 were shown below.
Chairman: Mr. Peter Fung
Vice Chairman: Ms. Angela Wong
Hon. Secretary: Ms. Minda Chiang
Hon Treasurer: Mr. C.P. Chow

After the AGM, Karson introduced the guest speaker Dr. TW Liu and he has more than 25 years of experience in the provision of consultancy services to industry. His expertise covers the area of intellectual property, in particular, in promoting the use of patent information databases, intellectual property protection and commercialization of innovations.

Firstly, Dr. Liu mentioned some misconceptions and IP rights did not assure quality. But he observed the countries had higher IP protection that countries also had higher innovation. Then Dr. Liu briefed the based concepts on Patent, Copyrights, Trademark and Trade Secret. (More details on reference)

Secondly, Dr. Liu stated the value of IP in different trade such as Coca-cola brand value, Google acquired Motorola for patents, Lenovo acquired Motorola Modbility patents, etc. Those Intangible assets in Innovation-based companies should be evaluation. Therefore, different types of IP Audits were needed included General Purpose, Event Driven and Limited Purpose Focused Audit.

During the IP audit, team composition was important and it involved different parties from CEO to different internal staff. The relationship was showed in the following diagram.

The IP Audit checklist sample was discussed. There were two standard to be reference which were “Innovation-Knowledge Enterprise IP Management Practice DB44/T 797-2010” and “Enterprise Intellectual Property Management GB/T 29490-2013”. After the IP Audit, we needed to perform IP Analysis for categorizing into 3 group such as “Important”, “Potential but Not necessary” and “No Value”.