The Filipino Inventors Society (FIS) will mark its diamond anniversary on the third week of November.
The highlight of the celebration is the holding of an Inventors’ Night with a dinner, an awarding and fellowship night at a hotel in Quezon City. More than 200 inventors from all over the country and their distinguished guests are expected to attend the event.
Prior to the Inventors Night, the FIS will have its National Inventors’ Week with the theme “Go Innovations! The Green Light for a Greater Philippines” at a mall in Quezon City from November 15 to 21.
This is in line with the Presidential Proclamation 285 of 1993 to showcase unique and marketable inventions of Filipinos to the Filipinos.
In line with this, FIS is seeking the support of President Duterte to help mobilize the Inventors’ Innovations and Grand Caravan.
The goal is to strengthen the investors’ support to the Duterte administration’s quest for inclusive growth and economic boost of the marginalized sectors like farmers, fisher folk, urban poor, etc; regreening 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 that do not provide equitable treatment to our co-Filipinos; and upraise urban farming and fishing to provide for self-liquidating livelihood and daily sustenance opportunities
The FIS was founded in 1943, amid World War II, by an intrepid triad of Teo Puruganan, Pastor Reyes-Torres and Dalmacio Buenaventura.
Incorporated in 1953 as a nonstock, nonprofit organization, FIS aims in promoting 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.
The achievements of FIS include the first National Exhibition of Inventions in 1957. This set the stage for Filipino inventors trying its hand in lobbying Congress for the inclusion of invention development assistance in government’s priority agenda.
It resorted to lobbying, for four years before the bill creating the Philippine Inventors Commission was passed in 1964. PIC, a creation of FIS, 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, wherein amateur and professional inventors competed in a national contest of their exhibited inventions and innovations.
In 1970 the PIC and FIS launched an initiative jump-starting innovative skills among the youth, a forerunner of the present Inventschool and Creativity Cram School flagship program by FIS-affiliate Manila Innovation Development Society Inc., headed by FIS Director Virgilio Malang.
Thereafter, then-President Ferdinand E. Marcos, heeding a petition by FIS, issued Presidential Decree (PD) 1423 on June 9, 1978. It created an Invention Guarantee Fund to assure the unsecured portion of industrial loans for the exploitation and manufacture of any registered Filipino invention, utility model or industrial design; granted a five-year exemption from all taxes and fees for inventors in the manufacture and commercialization of their industrial IPs; and enabled financial aid for prototyping and patenting.
FIS also secured Proclamation 187 that paved the way for the national annual observation of Inventors’ Week, a much-touted activity until 1988.
After Marcos was ousted in 1986, his successor former President Corazon C. Aquino’s first act was to abrogate PD1423, effectively annulling all tax exemptions and abolished all incentives and privileges hard-won by the inventors.
Aquino also abolished PIDI and replaced it with the Technology Application and Promotion Institute (TAPI) under the Department of Science and Technology.
The FIS members marched back to Congress to fight for the passage of a legislation better than PD 1423. Eventually, FIS pulled yet another coup with the passage of Republic Act 7459, also known as the Inventor and Inventions Incentives Act of 1992. However, incentives under the Act’s compromise provisions were not exclusively for inventions but for “technologies developed by local researchers or adapted locally from foreign sources, including inventions.”
Hence, FIS has petitioned for a revised set of implementing guidelines in simple, understandable terms, which, hopefully, FIS and TAPI will draft in the near future.
FIS linked up with academe for research and development. It has standing agreements with the Polytechnic University of the Philippines and De La Salle University to provide members with an outlet for their commercial creations.
It spearheaded the establishment of the Filipino Inventors’ Multipurpose Cooperative (Fimcoop) with a retail store, products display and office in Quezon City.
To locate markets abroad for commercialized inventions and innovations of members, Fimcoop, headed by Malang, established the Filipino Inventors Export-Import Inc., which incorporators include FIS Saudi Arabia Chapter.
Since it was established, FIS did not have a permanent place of business. Work has stalled but may soon resume on a planned P30-million Philippine Invention Development Center funded by Congress. The building shall serve as the national hub for the interaction of all inventors, including the unaffiliated and holders of intellectual property rights and proponents.
FIS also received assurance for another P30 million for the purchase of research and development equipment for the facility.
By the looks of it, FIS certainly is back and bound on track.
1 comment
what mall in quezon city are you having the event go innovations green lights for greater philippines. november 15 – 21. i attended only your exhibit at sm mehamall and bought a COINTAINER and ISICOIN. IT IS A COIN ORGANIZER. AM still using it up to now.