LES Global News—Highlights
High-Growth Technology Business Conference (HTBC) Asia 2021 By Audrey Yap, Immediate Past President , LES International
T
he HBTC 2021 (Asia) hybrid conference, the inaugural event organized in Asia, was held in Singapore at the Singapore Business Federation from Wednesday 28 April 2021 to Friday 30 April 2021. This hybrid conference, which involved in-person activities and workshops combined with a virtual conference, was a joint effort by the Licensing Executives Society International (LESI) and the European Patent Office (EPO) under the LESIEPO Workplan 2020/2021 and organized by LESI’s HGE Task Force and Asia Pacific ad hoc organizing committee with representatives from across the region: Lionel Tan, Chiew Yu Sarn, Dr. Cairan He, Ming Jie Chai (all LES SG), Patricia Bunye (LES PH), Ning Ling Wang (LES CN) Dr. Orakanoke (LES TH) and EPO representatives led by Thomas Bereuter. The opening remarks were given by our special guest, Dr. Lim Jui, CEO of SGInnovate, an agency established in Singapore to help entrepreneurial scientists build “deep tech” start-ups. We kicked off with Yann Meniere, the EPO Chief Economist, presenting key findings on the importance of IPR intensive industries for the economy. Juergen Graner, founder and CEO of Globalator and Vice Chair of the HGE Task force, flew into Singapore from the USA specially for HTBC to run the Transaction Based Growth
Management workshop. Chiew Yu Sarn, co-managing Partner of Yusarn Audrey and co-chair HGE Task Force and Mr. Chai Ming-Jie, Senior IP Counsel of Lenovo Limited and LES SG council member, conducted the second workshop on IP & Licensing. We had a total of 35 speakers from around the world, which included a number from the successful HTBC Europe 2019 held in Dublin and experts from Japan, India, China, Thailand and Singapore. Industry speakers included Marco Tong, ZTE; Dr Hemang Shah, Qualcomm; Rudd Peters, ex-CIPO, Philips; Dr Juran Kato, GEXVAL; Dr Tay, Celligenics; Jeric Cruz, Lazada; Carlos Fernandez, RecordTV/NexOpus. We were joined by Charlene Wong, IMDA SG; Duncan Ferguson, CSIRO Australia; Professor Alex Wurzer, CEIPI, Uni Strasbourg; Bowman Heiden, Chalmers UniTech; Alfred Yip, Director of Patents, IPOS; and many more. We had approximately 40 participants who attended inperson at the Singapore Business Federation, with 85% of them entrepreneurs and business owners, and 164 persons who had registered for the online event. It was truly a global event with registrants from around the world. The breakdown of the online participants by country is set out in the chart below. ■
Online Participants By Country
The HVTC hybrid conference, in Asia, involved in-person activities and workshops combined with a virtual conference. It was a joint effort by LESI and the EPO.
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Licensing Executives Society International
