Five Australian patent examiners recently travelled to Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Viet Nam, and Thailand offering bespoke mentoring to IP offices as they improve their training capacity.

These visits were the first face-to-face visits of the recently established launched Regional Patent Examination Training (RPET) Mentoring Program. RPET mentoring is the next stage for the award winning RPET Program, and has been designed to deliver long lasting outcomes for the participating offices.

Since the RPET Program began, 45 patent examiners from ASEAN offices have been trained to international patent standards. These RPET graduates continue to play a critical role in leading organisational reform through RPET Mentoring.

Through July and August, IP Australias RPET mentors travelled to Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia to review current patent examiner training practices and understand the priorities for future improvement.

IP Australias lead Mentor Baahini Sivakumar said that RPET Mentoring would build on the previous efforts of the RPET Program:

Participating IP Offices are now looking to embed key concepts from RPET as well as other training programs into their domestic context and we have adapted our involvement to meet this need. Our role, as Mentors, is now to provide ongoing guidance as the teams customise existing training material to local conditions and standardise their training practice.

RPET Mentoring Activity Manager, Mr Phan Thanh Hai from the National Office of Intellectual Property of Vietnam considers the visit as the very first but very important step to understand the current situation, to identify the gaps, and to discuss what should be the best way to achieve the aims and objectives of this office.

The RPET Mentoring Program is undertaken by IP Australia with support from the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Area (AANZFTA) Economic Cooperation Support Program (AECSP).

This Press Release was jointly developed by the IP Australia and the ASEAN Secretariat.