Innovation Research and Development Council was created at Georgian parliament to base national economy on innovations in pursuance with the best world experience. The Council will peruse each innovation proposal and scientific work so as to use the country’s intellectual potential take its nich among developed economies. Innovation has replaced the industrial economies globe over for at least two decades ago. Many European and South-Asian countries achieved economic success after they made innovations and technologies a backbone to their economies while Georgia been the leader in innovations among the Soviet Union member countries has been regressing to this direction and takes rear places even in the regional level after Azerbaijan and Armenia, let alone the global ratings that ranks Georgia number 130 among 140 countries. Number of inventions been five-fold higher in the soviet-Georgia has been shrinking since 90s of the past century so that the average figure of annually registered patents in Georgia makes around 250 and over 98% out of the figure comes on private persons. Universities are saying “pass”. And even this modest number of innovation ideas remain on the paper as cannot find due investments for commercialisation, Irakli Ghvaladze, Head of Sakpatent, Georgian national intellectual property protection body, said. Commensurately the profit authors of the new ideas and Georgian economy enjoy is zero. For comparison the volume of total income raised through patented inventions at the US universities accrues to USD 2.3 billion and the enterprises’ income [thanks to innovations] totals to hundreds of thousands billion US dollars, Temur Maisuradze, Head of the recently created Innovation Research and Development Council at parliament, is reported saying by Kviris Palitra newspaper. Meantime, the recent research of the UN on human resources rated Georgia as a highly developed country according to its human resources. Many inventions of Georgian scientists and specialist have been implemented abroad with great success but the country raised no profit out of this as inventors sell the ideas very cheap for attraction of investments to commercialize the new idea is very hard. Maisurade himself is an inventor who together with his brother created innovated version of rolling car lights that Japanese successfully implemented in reality. Georgian author invented a car security system that leading car producing companies put into practice.
“Georgia could not use its big potential and authors had to sell their innovations out just for nothing while developing countries sell licenses and the state enjoys a big profit. I would like Georgia to use its intellectual potential,” Maisuradze said. “Now Georgia has an ambition to change its reality otherwise it will be always rearing the ranks of developed economies.”
As a matter of fact, a Center for Technology Transfer aimed on innovation market demand and commercialization of new idea was set up at Sakpatent a year ago in pursuance with the best world experience but no breakthrough followed as of yet. According to Ghvaladze, they share the experience of the US, Germany and Israel who support the center through donors. All Georgian universities, business associations and relevant state structures are the founder of the Center but finding investors is still the key problem. Few projects were financed by international donors’ aid in frames of competition project past year. That’s all.
“Meantime there are very interesting ideas in agriculture like anti-hail equipment, some greenhouse-related ideas, as well as innovations in software programs and we work on implementing of these projects now, private business should be interested in it but there is very low demand at the local market as of yet,” Ghvaladze told Georgian Journal. Since the local market demand is low he finds apt on the first phase to patent new ideas abroad to protect them and then sell them out as Israel practices. He believes Georgia has very competitive intellectual potential to take its niche in global innovations.