Hong Kong is a centre of innovation in Asia. It is also a centre of commerce, trade, and finance in Asia.

Hong Kong is a focal point of the generation of Intellectual Property (“IP”). It is also the focal point for the trading in IP, including technology transfer, licensing, franchising, merchandising and copyright trading.

Knowledge driven businesses dominate today’s economies. As innovation and the knowledge based economy become more and more important in trade and commerce, so does Hong Kong’s role as a premier IP trading hub in Asia increase.

In 2013, a Working Group on IP Trading was established to strategise the promotion of Hong Kong as an IP trading hub and help the government devise supporting measures. The Working Group has endorsed a Strategic Framework in November 2013, which covers four strategic areas: enhancing the IP protection regime; supporting IP creation and exploitation; fostering IP intermediary services and enhancing manpower capacity; and promotion, education and external collaboration efforts.

Vision

The vision of the Framework is to “Position and promote Hong Kong as the premier IP trading hub in Asia”. This sets out the long term view of what the Government wants to become, both to inspire actions within Government and to communicate with the stakeholders outside.

Mission

The Framework sets out the following three missions as high-level representations of what the Government wants and does now to achieve the vision:

  1. leverage and further Hong Kong’s advantages in financial, legal and physical infrastructure, IP regime, professional services and specific role as “gateway to Mainland China”, in attracting international IP trading and management activities to take place in Hong Kong;
  2. build up the necessary clusters conducive to the overall development of Hong Kong as a knowledge-based economy that spearheads exploitation and commercialisation of IP and supports enterprises to make the most of IP as a core business asset that should be built, managed, valued and leveraged strategically to drive innovation and growth; and
  3. explore means to promote Hong Kong’s creative industries, innovative technologies and IP economies through IP creation, protection, exploitation, management and trading.

For more information about the policy initiatives of IP Trading, please visit here.