EPO: Filings rebound after crisis

The European Patent Office (EPO) announced its statistics for 2010 last Tuesday. After a slump in filings in 2009, the number of filings has rebounded and surpassed the pre-crisis level; in fact, the 235,000 applications received in 2010 constitute the largest number of applications filed ever in the 34-year history of the EPO.

43% of applications resulted in granted patents (obviously not of the applications filed in 2010...).

The number of patents granted per country of residence of the applicant also shows a familiar picture (see the IPKat's take on the 2009 statistics here). The top ten nations in terms of patents granted are Germany (12,553), USA (12,506), Japan (10,580), France (4,536), Switzerland (2,389), Italy (2,287), UK (1,857), the Netherlands (1,725), Sweden (1,467), South Korea (1,392) and Canada (730).

While granted patents are an imperfect measure of the innovative force of a country's economy (and the numbers for Japan and Germany inflated because of peculiar employee-invention laws), it is nonetheless striking how large the differences between similarly situated European countries can be. While France's population (65 million) and Gross Domestic Product ($ 2.5 trillion) are roughly 50% larger than Spain's (46 million and $ 1.4, acc. to CIA Factbook), France was granted 4,536 patents in 2010, while Spain (better: applicants from Spain) received a mere 393. That's less than 10% of France's rate. And don't tell me it's all due to the fact that Spanish is not an official language at the EPO... or compare Norway (4.7 million, $ 413 billion) to Switzerland (7.6 million, $ 522 billion). Both are well-off European nations with a similar per capita GDP. But Switzerland received 314 patents per 1 million inhabitants, Norway 39. Let's hope that oil lasts for a while...

Finally, the top ten applicants.

Many more tables and graphs on the EPO's website.