The European Patent Office (EPO) is the HQ of Europe’s patent treasures and is located in a huge glass building in Munich. The EPO oversees national state member patent offices as well as handling relationships with other national patent bodies outside Europe. It is a big organisation of some 6 300 people, most of whom are scientists.
Only a very few of us ever get involved with patents – it is the critical lifeblood of inventors, engineers, and lawyers who the work in this highly technical sector surrounded in legal mystique.
However, the EPO produce realms of data – and some of these numbers shine important light on Nordic innovations and Nordic competitiveness.
At the global level, you can see in the first graph below that two Nordic companies are in the top 50 club. Ericsson and Nokia are 5th and 12th, well in front of Apple and Microsoft! The table shows the largest applicants at the EPO. It indicates the total number of European applications filed with the EPO for each and the split between direct European applications (Direct) and international (PCT) applications that entered the European phase (PCT regional) during the reporting period:
The second graph below shows the number of European patent applications filed with the EPO for the 10 technology fields with the largest number of applications in 2023, which represents 57% of the total number of European filed applications filed:
Innovative performance of countries, their number of patent applications to the EPO can be related to the size of their population. This graph below shows country ranking based on the ratio of number of European patent applications filed with the EPO per million inhabitants. Here again the Nordics do extremely well sharing the top four places with Swizerland:
… and finally there is a really good piece of news based on recent EPO data.
Women innovators are growing in number.
In 2022, the EPO published a study on women’s participation in inventive activity, investigating how often women were named as inventors on patent applications. Of all the patent applications filed at the EPO by European applicants in 2023, 27% named at least one woman as an inventor. The rate varies significantly across countries and technologies. Among the larger European patent filing countries, Spain (46%), France (33%) and Belgium (32%) saw the highest shares of patent applications naming at least one woman as inventor. In terms of technology sectors, the average share ranged from 14% for filings in mechanical engineering to 50% in chemistry:
All the graphs are from the EPO 2023 Report and can be found on their website here.
