If we look at Europe with a historical perspective, we will see that there have been hundreds of inventors who have contributed to making our lives healthier, easier and more productive: Katalin Karikó with messenger RNA (ribonucleic acid) technology for vaccines against Covid-19; Karlheinz Brandenburg with MP3 or Jaap Haartsen, with Bluetooth, among many others.
However, to be able to analyze the real state of inventive activity in Europe, we need to go beyond these singular examples and question whether the continent is harnessing its full creative potential to drive society and the economy through of innovation. We have to compare Europe with other innovative regions of the world.
If we look at the data on inventive productivity, we can objectively conclude that Europe can and should do better. Although it invests 20% of global R&D expenditure and that this translates into 20% of scientific output (based on the number of scientific publications), in 2020 the European Patent Office recorded only 10% of worldwide applications for global patents – a figure lower than the 17% recorded in 2010-.
In other words, all the effort that companies and taxpayers make to invest in R D results in a proportional production of science, but when it comes to transforming this scientific production on a European scale into innovations that solve the problems of our day to day, the result is not up to expectations.
The reasons for this difference in inventive productivity go elsewhere. How can we encourage inventiveness in the Old Continent? Does Europe’s patent system encourage inventiveness and innovation enough? The reality is not very positive.
Although the entry into force of the European Patent Convention (1973) and the creation of the European Patent Office (EPO) represented a major advance in the promotion of European inventiveness, the results 50 years later demonstrate that significant improvements are needed. And the fact is that the EPO is currently only the fifth patent office in the world in terms of the number of applications, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization, behind China – which has recently climbed to the first position in the ranking -, the United States, Japan and Korea.
Beyond the cultural differences and economic dynamics that could partially explain why Europe lags behind other regions of the world in terms of the number of patent applications, we should focus on the European patent system itself .
The current European patent system is still fragmented as, when granted, European patents are divided into local and national patents. This represents a real odyssey for inventors and technology companies when defending their rights against copies, because they have to validate patents in each country. Although the unitary patent will provide unified protection of patent rights across Europe from 2023, the countries that have signed up to it do not yet reach two-thirds of the EU states, and there are two, Spain and Croatia, which have decided to stay out of it.
We urgently need all EU countries to ratify the Unitary Patent Agreement as soon as possible to finally create a unified market for inventions and technological assets in Europe, a market that will be bigger than that of the United States. If we add to this the role of the Unified Patent Court for the effective application of this agreement in the future, it is to be expected that from 2023 the European patent system will experience an increase in activity comparable to that it was in the US in 1982, when the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was created, which improved the consistency and predictability of patent rights across the country.
A predictable European-wide patent right will undoubtedly provide great confidence to inventors and their investors to mitigate the risks inherent in innovation.
A unified, coherent, reliable and predictable European patent system is urgently needed. But it is also essential that this is competitive and accessible to everyone, and that it focuses on offering full protection to everything that is patentable in a patent application. If in Europe we want to ensure that inventors can develop their full potential and offer their inventions to society, we must collaborate to make the European patent system the best in the world.
Carlos Bridge. Professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia – BarcelonaTech and co-founder and inventor of Fractus
