The Innovation and Technology Support Office (ITSO) participated in the 2019 Annual ITSO General Assembly organized by Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPhl) last September 5-6, 2019 held at the Our Lady of Fatima University – San Fernando, Pampanga. Representing UST were Assoc. Prof. Michael Francis D. Benjamin, PhD, ITSO Officer and Assoc. Prof. Michael Jorge N. Peralta, MS, MSc, Ll. M., ITSO Manager.
The activity is an annual assembly of all ITSO institutions in the country which are comprised of universities, government agencies, and research and development institutes. The Global Innovation Index of the Philippines was presented, alongside the impact the ITSOs play in improving our ranking. The Philippines rose from rank 78th to 54th. One of the reasons of the jump is the increased number of patent filings by the ITSOs. Also discussed was the re-engineering of the ITSOs in order to be more aggressive in their indicators. The proposal of IPOPhl is to measure the performance of ITSO based on certain metrics which are still under discussion.
One of the goals of the ITSO initiative is to protect IPs that are generated in universities and follow them through commercialization and technology transfer. There are total of 94 ITSO to date of which UST is one the first batches who were publicly launched in 2012.
