APAC sees rise in patent activity, quality

SINGAPORE--Asia-Pacific economies such as Japan, China, Taiwan and Singapore are leading the way in the submission and approval of patents from the United States Patents and Trademark Office (USPTO), indicating a rise in innovation within the region, noted a new study. However, such innovation is highly uneven across the region.

Released Thursday, the Asia-Pacific Intellectual Property (IP) Scorecard 2009 revealed that the number of patents created by Asia-Pacific economies has "risen considerably" since the mid-1990s. In 1995, for instance, patents from the region, excluding Japan, accounted for only 4 percent of the total patents granted by the USPTO, but the number has since risen to 13.3 percent in 2009.

The IP scorecard for the region is the second study released to date; the first was published in 2004.

Zooming in on the figures, Wong Poh Kam, director of the National University of Singapore's Entrepreneurship Center, pointed out that China is a primary driver for the increase in patent activity. The country contributed 3,108 patents, or 1.6 percent of total patents worldwide, in 2009, reflecting a 36 percent growth per annum from 2005 to 2009, he noted.

Comparatively, other top patent producers in the region such as Taiwan, Singapore and Japan registered growth rates of 8.5 percent, 8 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively. The average global growth rate is 5.6 percent.

Such momentum, Wong noted, will see China overtake Japan in the next five to 10 years as the region's top patent holder. The director was speaking at a media briefing, which was organized in conjunction with the third Global Forum on Intellectual Property (GFIP) held here.

Currently, the U.S. remains the top patent holder in the world with Japan in second place, said Wong.

Quality vs. quantity
That said, the quality of the patents reflect a different picture, Wong noted. According to him, the study used the propensity of a patent to be cited by other patents as a "crude measure" of a patent's influence and importance, which would indicate the quality of the application. This is known as the Relative Citation Index (RCI), he added.

Under this category, Singapore outranked its Asia-Pacific peers, as it received the highest average number of citations for patents invented in the last 10 years, the scorecard indicated. China, on the other hand, dropped from seventh in 2005 to No. 10 in 2009. The study attributed its decline to a large increase in the number of patents granted and the changing composition of its patenting activities as the world's most populous nation shifts focus to fields such as ICT.

"New patents tend to not get cited while, conversely, the longer a patent has been in existence the more it will be cited by other patents," explained Wong. "This bias should be taken into account when looking at the RCI results."

Singapore's top billing is also partly because many of the patents cited belonged to well-known multinational companies operating out of Singapore, he said. As such, the technology created in Singapore is likely to be part of a bigger project being put together by the organization and these patents would be cited more often. Many of China's new patents, though, are submitted by local companies that are lesser known and therefore unlikely to be cited as much, he noted.

Offering additional insight to China's innovation roadmap, Peter Williamson, professor of international management at University of Cambridge's Judge Business School, pointed to the government's desire to move its economy away from being a low-cost manufacturing hotspot to a knowledge-based one.

A keynote speaker at the GFIP, Williamson noted in his presentation that, increasingly, China's patent filings are shifting from electrical- and electronics-based technologies to applications focusing on "physics, mechanical engineering, chemistry and metallurgy", among others.

His observation corresponds with the government's stance. According to a national document titled "National Patent Development Strategy (2011-2020)", which was released by the State Intellectual Property Board of China in November last year, the government is looking to increase its annual patent filings to two million by 2015.

The document, translated by the USPTO, also stated: "[By 2015,] China will rank among the top two in the world in terms of the annual number of patents for inventions granted to the domestic applicants, and the quality of patents filed will further improve."

Further proof of China's move towards a knowledge-based economy came from a Financial Times report Wednesday. The article stated that in 2008, Huawei, a Chinese telecoms equipment and service provider, registered more patents than any other company, citing figures provided by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). In 2010, the Chinese company was second only to Japan's Panasonic in terms of patents filed, it added.