Tim Moss, former CEO at the UKIPO, will be remembered fondly by UK intellectual property practitioners.
He wasn’t one of them – unlike the US, the UK tends to pick civil servants rather than practitioners for the top IP office job.
But he understood their concerns and was always collegiate in how he handled the thorny IP debates that arose in the UK in recent years.
When he announced he would step down in September to take a new job in the Welsh government, the consensus among the IP profession was that Moss played a bad hand well.
As he told Managing IP after his inclusion in last year’s list, Brexit defined his tenure at the organisation.
The UKIPO weathered that disruption and accomplished plenty more.
Shortly after he announced his departure, Moss revealed at Managing IP’s Intellectual Property and Innovation Summit that the UKIPO had cleared its backlog of patent applications for the first time in 15 years.
This was the year the UKIPO was able to change the agenda and start being proactive in what it wanted to achieve.
While the Brexit-related work was ongoing, the UKIPO developed its One IPO Transformation programme.
This mooted revamp of the office’s digital services was rooted in a modernisation drive that took off in earnest under Moss.
His successor has yet to be named – but whoever it is, that person will have a solid foundation to build on thanks to Moss’s work on Brexit and much more.
