editorial team
The Filipino Inventors Society (FIS) marks the 75th Diamond Year anniversary this 3rd week of November 2018 for the highlights of the celebration is the Dinner/ Award/ Fellowship Night at the SEDA Vertis North Hotel, to be attended by 200+ inventors all over the country with other distinguished guests.
Prior to the Investors Night, the FIS Planning Conglomerate has envisioned an eclectic program on 15-21 November 2018 featuring the much-awaited NATIONAL INVENTORS’ WEEK with the theme: GO INNOVATIONS! – The Green Light for a Greater PHILIPPINES at The Skydome, SM City North Edsa. This is in line of the Presidential Proclamation #285 of 1993 to showcase unique and marketable inventions of Filipinos to the Filipinos.
In line with this, the Officers and Conveners of the Filipino Inventors’ Society (FIS), who would like to seek the support of our dear President RODRIGO ROA DUTERTE to help mobilize our Inventors’ Innovations and Grand Caravan.
The goal is to strengthen our support to PRRD administration’s quest for:
- Inclusive growth and economic boost of the marginalized sectors like farmers, fisher folk, urban poor, etc;
- Re-greening of the country’s air, land, and sea environments;
- Heighten ways to enhance and reduce costs of socialized housing construction;
- Upholding ways to enhance employment generation in the face of certain displacements in countries which do not provide equitable treatment to our co-Filipinos and
- Upraise urban farming, fishing, to provide for self-liquidating livelihood and daily sustenance opportunities
In the middle of World War II, the Filipino Inventors Society (FIS) was founded by Teo Puruganan, Pastor Reyes-Torres and Dalmacio Buenaventura. Subsequently, FIS was incorporated in 1953 as a non-stock, non-profit NGO, aiming to promote the interests of inventors and their work by providing assistance in developing, protecting, and locating markets for their inventions, utility models and industrial designs; diffusing information relating to industrial intellectual property; speaking for inventors nationwide; and, cooperating with similarly bent persons and entities.
Engaging achievements of FIS include the first National Exhibition of Inventions in 1957. This set the stage for Filipino inventors trying its hand lobbying Congress for the inclusion of invention development assistance in government’s priority agenda. The bill creating the Philippine Inventors Commission (PIC) was passed in 1964. PIC was renamed Philippine Invention Development Institute (PIDI) in 1982.
In 1967, FIS initiated and organized in cooperation with PIC the observance of the first Inventors’ Week, a week-long extravaganza wherein amateur and professional inventors competed for glory in a national contest of their exhibited inventions and innovations. FIS also secured Proclamation 187 that paved the way for the national annual observation of Inventors’ Week, a much touted activity until 1988.
During the first Aquino regime, PIDI was replaced with the Technology Application and Promotion Institute (TAPI) under the Department of Science and Technology (DOST).
Despite the passage of Republic Act 7459, also known as the Inventor and Inventions Incentives Act of 1992, incentives under its compromise provisions were not exclusively for inventions but for “technologies developed by local researchers or adapted locally from foreign sources including inventions”. This has underlain subsequent confusion in priorities. The other blot on this generally reassuring, even cheering piece of legislation, is that since its implementation, nobody, at least at FIS, seems to fully grasp how it operates. Hence, FIS has feverishly been petitioning for a revised set of implementing guidelines in simple, understandable terms which, hopefully, FIS and TAPI will cogently draft in the very near future.
Since it was established, FIS did not have a permanent place of business to call its own. Now, work has stalled but may soon resume on a planned Php30 million Philippine Invention Development Center (PIDC) funded by Congress, once more, at the instigation of FIS. The building shall serve as the national hub for the interaction of all inventors, including the unaffiliated and other IP rights holders and proponents. The multifaceted center will consist of four elements: (1) a national headquarters for the umbrella organization for national inventors, the FIS, its chapters and affiliates; (2) a conference center; (3) a permanent exhibition floor; and (4) a learning/resource center featuring a computerized library facility to serve as national storehouse of information on inventions and innovations. Further, FIS received assurance for another Php30 million for the purchase of research and development equipment for the facility. This is one mega plum for FIS.
And by the looks of it, FIS certainly is back and bound on track.
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