THE @EPOOrg
Twitter account was greenwashing almost every single day this past week (we track almost everything they post) because the European Patent Office (EPO) is not green. Similarly, for more or less the same reasons, it keeps mentioning "SMEs"; it's because that's what the EPO hurts the most (same googlebombing for "quality", "ethics" and "social" in recent weeks, coinciding with the Haar question). "Learn about Y02, the new patent classification scheme for climate change mitigation technologies," one such tweet said. There were several more and also retweets.
The European Patent Office (EPO) has a quality management system (QMS) which received ISO 9001 certification (an internationally recognised QMS standard) in 2014. It is the only patent office in the world to have such recognition. The recently published EPO 2018 Quality Report assesses the performance of the office on an operational level and user satisfaction basis, as well as determining whether the QMS is being properly implemented.It's written like a marketing brochure composed (or ghostwritten) by the EPO's PR staff. Maybe that's just what it is. IAM seems eager to lose any remnants of credibility. It's just going to perish, having been absorbed by another firm that's like PR services for law firms. Maybe the EPO can hire IAM one day, directly, as a PR agency, not just via a PR agency (as it did years back). ⬆
The findings in the report are based on feedback from various sources, including customer services, complaints, market research, EPO staff and satisfaction surveys. Over 5,000 telephone interviews and online questionnaires were overseen by an external auditor for the 2018 report. We have gone through all the data to bring you the top takeaways.