Number of patent applications filed to the European patent office (EPO) for inventions

The OECD have created a search strategy for environment-related technologies (ENV-TECH) based on more than 200,000 different classification symbols, containing both International Patent Classification (IPC) symbols and Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) symbols. The classifications cover a broad spectrum of technologies related to environmental pollution, water scarcity and climate change mitigation. The classifications found in the ENV-TECH search strategy have been grouped according to their relevance within 12 innovation systems. Not all the classifications found in the ENV-TECH search strategy have been used. For each innovation system, a list of the relevant CPC and IPC schemes is created. The raw patent data found in the OECD REGPAT database (which contains all patent filed to the EPO) is then filtered for each list. This yields the number of patent applications relevant within each innovation system. These are allocated fractionally to the inventor(s) country according to inventor share. The patents are then sorted according to the priority year of filing. Only patents filed to the EPO are listed in the data. This contains inventions sought protected within the jurisdiction of the EPO and also captures international patents filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), which must also be filed to the EPO. The method does, however, not list patents which are filed to either the United States Patents and Trademark Office (USPTO) or the Japan Patent Office (JPO) alone. Hence, inventions which are sought protected in the ERA countries and all the PCT member states are covered, but not inventions which are sought protected under the jurisdiction of either the USPTO or JPO alone. The patents are also listed according to the country of the inventor(s), though an invention may have been developed in a different country. Many patents are never used in any industrial application, and do therefore not contribute to innovation directly. Many inventions are also not sought patented, either because they cannot be patented or because the inventors attempt to protect the invention through other means. These inventions are not captured through patent statistics, which are then not a perfect indicator for innovation. Be aware that due to delayed data entries in the OECD patent database the values for the last couple of years might be underestimated and could possibly increase over the next years. Have this in mind when working with data from recent years.