International Activities

　　On September 11, 2017, Mr. Lutz, Vice-President of EPO, Mr. Spigarelli, Chief Director (Quality Management), and two other members visited JIPA. JIPA held an information and opinion exchange meeting with the EPO officials at the JIPA Tokyo office, in which nine members including Mr. Kato, Managing Director of JIPA, Mr. Yoshioka, chairman of the Second International Committee, and Mr. Miyashita, PJ leader of the International Policy participated from JIPA.

　　This is a meeting held almost annually as an EPO-JIPA Partnership for Quality meeting since 2012. This meeting is not merely a meeting for information gathering but also an intensive meeting as an opportunity for EPO to directly hear comments from Japanese users and as an opportunity for JIPA to directly feedback analysis results of and demands for the various measures and actual examination of EPO.

　　In the meeting of this year, EPO made presentations on recent efforts for quality management with a focus on feedback from users, a series of measures for acceleration of examination, recent changes in procedures, etc. JIPA made a presentation on verification results of the recent EPO measures for acceleration of examination based on a survey of a certain amount of samples and showed that a certain effect can be quantitatively understood.

　　Aggressive questions about the respective presentations were asked from both EPO and JIPA and answered. In particular, EPO made a comment on the presentation of JIPA, saying that EPO appreciated the regular feedback of survey results based on data. We promised to continuously hold such an opinion exchange meeting in the future.