REMARKS DELIVERED BY ATTY. PATRICIA A. O. BUNYE AT THE LES PHILIPPINES INDUCTION, 09 JUNE 2006

It is my honor and privilege to be serving as President of LES Philippines during these very exciting times. As many of you know, after an uphill battle, we have won our bid to host the 2009 LES International Conference here in the Philippines.

On one hand, hosting the International Conference may be viewed as a daunting task that will require so much from us in terms of time and effort. I prefer to view it as an event that presents boundless opportunities for us to broaden our professional horizons, meet and network with valuable contacts, generate revenue for our organization and secure a place for ourselves in the international licensing community. In other words, it is a win-win situation for us all.

There are obvious benefits from hosting the 2009 International Conference. For many of the delegates, it will be their first time to visit the Philippines. It is therefore up to us to showcase the best our country can offer as a tourism destination. In this regard, our Department of Tourism has already thrown its support behind our project and has pledged assistance all the way to 2009.

More importantly, we have the chance to highlight the attractiveness of the Philippines in terms of foreign investments. We must never lose sight of the uniqueness of LES as an organization. It is primarily a business organization, and not an organization of lawyers. Internationally, it is composed of decision makers such as Managing Directors, company executives, entrepreneurs, university licensors, technology licensing managers, venture capitalists, inventors, technology brokers, consultants and so on. Considering that in the Philippines, the majority of our members are lawyers, we must, in the next few years, focus on broadening our membership base so that our interaction with one another may be more meaningful and dynamic, and so that we can truly promote and facilitate the commercialization of intellectual property.

As members of LES, it is upon us to create opportunities for commercialization. We cannot afford to wait for those opportunities to present themselves. It is likewise our responsibility to create an environment that promotes the commercialization of IP, bearing in mind that the level of development of a country is directly linked to its climate of innovation, and that robust licensing activities stimulate the growth of our local economy. In this connection, we plan to have study groups to discuss whether LES Philippines should push for legislation similar to the Bayh Dole Act of the United States.

In addition to broadening our membership base, we must focus on assisting local universities and research institutions in developing their licensing skills. We have already discussed with the Department of Science and Technology, particularly one of its lead agencies, the Philippine Council for Advanced Science and Technology Research and Development (PCASTRD), the possibility of partnering to help develop our country’s capabilities in advanced science and technology areas such as biotechnology, electronics, ICT, materials science and so on. LES Philippines can provide assistance in areas such as technology valuation and in matching potential licensors and licensees. Toward this end, we hope to hold very soon a licensing fair with the objective of showcasing the available technologies for licensing.

Copies of our calendar of activities for 2006-2008 will be distributed to you shortly. The details of most of these activities were presented to you at our General Membership Meeting last March. I would just like to highlight the meeting next week in Hong Kong with the President of LESI, Mr. Peter Chrocziel, during which we will be discussing the 2009 Meeting and the run-up activities that we can hold in cooperation with other LES Societies in Asia, notably Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Chinese Taipei and Korea.

We will also have more frequent LES Kapihans to bring to the fore the burning issues in the licensing world. The innovation we would like to introduce this term is that each industry committee within LES will be tasked to organize 1 Kapihan each to ensure a wide variety of topics and issues, and to encourage greater participation among our members.

I hope to hear from you on how we can make these activities more productive and worthwhile for all of us.