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Metadata: Patent applications

Source

Expertisecentrum Onderzoek en Ontwikkelingsmonitoring (ECOOM) (Centre for Research & Development Monitoring), European Patent Office (EPO)

Definitions

A patent grants the holder a temporary exclusive right to make, sell or exploit an invention. This right is granted by the authorities in exchange for the disclosure of the invention. In order to be awarded this right, the invention needs to comply with a number of strict requirements: the invention must be new, innovative, open to industrial application as well as authorized. These requirements must be fulfilled cumulatively.

Patents may relate to products as well as results or processes, which means they may pertain to new products, materials or tools/equipment, or methods to produce them. The holder of a patent right has the right to prohibit all third parties from using or copying the invention during a specific period of time (there are legal exceptions though). The figures refer to patent applications submitted to the European Patent Office (EPO).

Remarks on quality

As a rule, patents are assigned to a region or a country if the inventor or the applicant is a citizen of that region or country. In the case of co-inventions or co-applications in which several countries or regions are involved, the patents are counted as a full patent for each entity concerned (the so-called ‘full count’ principle).

For some inventions, no patent applications are made.

Patent applications are published only 18 months after the application was submitted. This explains the relatively important time lag in the statistics.

Alongside the patents awarded by the European Patent Office (EPO), other systems exist: US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and Patent Cooperation Treaty (PTO). Those other systems are not included in the figures of this statistic.

Luxembourg is the only country in the international comparison to have fewer than one million inhabitants. For the calculation of the number of patents applied for per million inhabitants, the absolute number of patents must therefore be divided by a factor less than 1 (= multiplied by a factor greater than 1) and is therefore in fact smaller than what the indicator ‘number of patents applied for per million inhabitants’ shows.

To the statistics

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