The Technology Transfer Office at Instituto Superior Técnico (TT) organised this Thursday a set of sessions on Intellectual Property. The main goal of these sessions is “to disseminate information on intellectual property, encouraging the protection of inventions with potential impact on economic growth”, said Rita Mendonça, one of the people responsible for the event.

Jorge Mendes, who is a patent examiner at the Portuguese Institute of Industrial Property, was the guest speaker and shared several examples of what can be patented and what cannot be patented, talked about the existing limitations and gave many advices on the procedures to be followed.

The criteria for patentability require that a product or manufacturing process fulfills the conditions of novelty, inventiveness, industrial applicability, sufficiency and clarity of the description. “Ideas are not patentable, but their technical solution is”, he clarified. “An invention must solve a technical problem and must have industrial applicability”, he also noted.