What specific technology represents a certain country?

Watches are made in Switzerland, robots in Japan, software in the US-silicon-valley and the Netherlands is the bicycles-country. Is it that simple? Is there a certain technology-field that a certain country represents more than all others? What are “typical markets” in certain countries?

Within a worldwide patent evaluation study this question was investigated and indeed there are technologies where in certain countries almost 90% of all patents worldwide are granted. These markets are very country-specific. And for these markets these technologies seem to play a very important role, which means from a patent point of view that inventions addressing these technologies must be granted in these countries in order to have covered the most relevant markets.

Methodology

The basis for the study were all patents including 159[1] countries.

All patents have been sorted by applications and granted patents. This was done for different time intervals, each containing one calendar year. Then for all these patents the international patent classification (IPC) was analysed in order to find a certain classification level[2] that would make sense to analyse. In order to be able to determine a significant amount of patents - some IPC classes are covering a very specific technological field – the variation of patents within a year inside each IPC-level was analysed. The result was that in IPC level 3 (i.e. H01L) the highest significance for all classification fields could be determined.

On this level all IPC class sizes for all countries were determined. Afterwards the share of each IPC class compared to the total size of all patents was determined, on a worldwide level and on country level. These two ratios were compared. Also the ratio of a country’s IPC class to the total worldwide amount of patents in this class was built.

From a procedural state point of view it was important to exclude senseless applications that i.e. document the state of the art or those that were done in order to pretend patent activity (strategic applications) or defensive publications. For this reason only the granted patents were taken into account.

Results

The results were quite amazing. It is obvious that technologies are not equally distributed in each country and that this distribution is also different to the worldwide average according to the fact that i.e. the industrialization level and economic structure is different. The study shows impressively that certain technologies are extremely dominant in different countries - compared with the global average.

What is this information used for? Within patent valuation it is always important to have a look on the technology itself and the markets that were addressed with it. Here is one essential question: Is this technology a trend, in growth, descending or a niche? And of cause how relevant is it for a certain market? In terms of valuing a patent this is essential. It is clear that technologies with high relevance, where many patents are applied are of higher value than those where just few patents are applied. And of cause this is country-specific. This means that a patent that is filed in a certain country and describing a technology that has a strong relevance in this country must be of higher value than a patent that is filed in the same country but of low technical relevance for this country.

Most granted patents per country and technology field

The first results were the shares of a country’s IPC Class size in relation to the total IPC Class size. The problem: By building the ratio, the total sizes of the IPC class sections are getting lost. Especially by analysing only the granted patents the total amount of patents in IPC Classes even on level 3 varied strongly. So the biggest class size contained 521,608 and the smallest only 15 granted patents[3], the average size was 14,484 patents per IPC class.

So the result of this analysis was named “big fish in a small tank”. Surprisingly there were even some countries having more than 10% of all granted patents worldwide where the total size of IPC classes was even bigger than the average. Here the technologies were indeed meaningful and significant for a country. In order to make the analysis even more meaningful, not only the biggest IPC Class section per country was shown but the top 4 sections.

The top 10 countries with the biggest (in average) and most remarkable shares will be described below: