The city of Shanghai in East China is really stepping up its intellectual property, or IP work in the current year.

That's to handle the new changes being introduced in the World Bank's assessment system for the global business environment, which have significantly increased the requirements for IP.

The World Bank is rolling out a new project to measure the business – enabling environments in economies worldwide.

In its market competition indicators system, many related indicators for IP and innovation have been added around three key dimensions of the quality of regulations, adequacy of public services and efficiency in the implementation of key services.

According to the Shanghai Intellectual Property Administration, or SIPA, the city will promote high-quality IP work in five areas: serving overall reform and development, enhancing the level of IP protection, promoting the effective use of IP, strengthening the supply of IP services and optimizing the development environment of IP.

In addition, SIPA will lead the way in six tasks and two support tasks in Shanghai's latest action plan for optimizing its business environment.

The tasks cover various aspects such as the digital empowerment of IP governance and IP pledge financing. They will also cover the one-stop IP service for enterprises intending to list their shares on the Shanghai Stock Exchange Science and Technology Innovative Board, or STAR Market.

The latest data showed that last year Shanghai authorized 36, 800 invention patents, an increase of 11.98 percent year-on-year.

Moreover, the city's Patent Cooperation Treaty, or PCT international patent applications reached 5,591, an increase of 15.76 percent, while the level of high-value invention patents per 10,000 of its population reached 40.9, a year-on-year increase of 6.7 percent.

This year, Shanghai aims for that to reach about 45 high-value invention patents per 10,000 people and to break through 7,000 PCT international patent applications.