Recently, China issued the Opinions on Accelerating the Development of Sports Industry and Promoting Sports Consumption (hereafter as the Opinions). The Opinions recognized the intellectual property (IP) as one of the most important forces to promote sustainable development of social economy.
According to the Opinions, till 2025 the total operation capital of sports industry will reach over 5 trillion RMB. To achieve this goal the government will improve the technological achievement transformation to strengthen the IP protection and utilization and promote the industrialization of scientific and technological achievements in sports industry. Specifically, the government will
- Encourage research and development of technological sports products of independent intellectual property rights, boost the added value and market competitiveness of those products, and promote creativeness and design development of the sports as well as the development of relevant industries;
- Make full use of the scientific and technological resources to improve scientific research platform system in sports industry field, and promote instruction of the research and development center and the engineering technology research center of enterprises etc.;
- Take efforts to establish strategic alliances and cooperation mechanism among enterprises, universities and research institutes, and select the eligible enterprises to take the lead for scientific and technological programs with special and particular funds;
- Improve the development and IP protection of the intangible assets such as sports organizations, sports events, venues and symbols by means of Naming Rights, cooperation, sponsorship, advertisements and franchising etc.;
- Promote sports brand construction by applying the trademark strategy to foster more internationally competitive enterprises and proprietary brands, encourage the export of those advanced enterprises, brands and projects and scale up and specialize the operation management of the entities, etc..
