The People’s Daily reports that in 2010 China filed 6,552 invention patent applications at the USPTO, 2,049 at the European Patent Office, 1,001 at the Japan Patent Office and 496 at the Korean Intellectual Property Office. IP Komodo had some research done a while back on Asian emerging markets which showed that China was consistently filing over 6,000 PCTs a year now. By comparison, India is around half that – in 2008 Indian inventors filed 2,879 patents. More detailed data on the comparatively much lower SE Asia filings is on my IP Komodo blog here
Is this more evidence that China is blazing a trail towards developed country levels of patent filings and leaving its Asian emerging neighbours far behind? We know there are some poor quality patents China’s global docket – patents filed because government grants paid for them and otherwise disinterested applicants filed them anyway. Or patent thickets created by some of China’s global IT players to find a way into the pools and standards groups. IP Komodo would be interested in seeing how many Chinese triadic patents there are – that is patents filed in the US, EU and Japan. This by virtue of the cost and difficulty reaching grant is a better measure of strong patents and thus innovation at a fundamental level. In 2005 Europe, US and Japan still accounted for 88% of triadic patents, with Korea as a close 4th. Does anyone have any up to date data on whether China is increasing its triadic patent count?
Guest post by IP Komodo Dragon
