A Descriptive Study on Intellectual Property Rights in India Challenges for MSMEs &Institutional Support

Despite the prominent role of MSMEs in Indian economy, they are suffered from plethora of problems like less exposure to finance, raw material issues, problems in marketing their products and services, global competition, low product differentiation etc. Even SMEs cannot protect the product and service differentiation because of high fee structure for acquiring Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs). As a result MNCs may copy the unique process or methodology of their SME counterparts. To reduce the vulnerability of SMEs and to protect their unique products and services from large and Multi National Companies, Government is encouraging SMEs to acquire IPRs. Present study is an attempt to identify the opportunities for SMEs to acquire IPRs, Government incentives to SMEs in getting patents and identify and analyse the number of SMEs applied and acquired IPRs with the help of government incentives.