Patents in water related technologies (except wastewater) per mill. inhab.

Short description

Number of patent applications filed to the European patent office (EPO) for inventions within water related technologies (except wastewater). The indicator is expressed in terms of “Number of patent applications per one million inhabitants”.

Be aware that due to delayed data entries in the original 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.

Meta data

Unit:

number of patent applications per one million inhabitants

Original data

Data:

water_patents_inhab.csv

Unit for original data:

patent applications

Date of extraction:

Friday, May 25, 2018

Data source link:

OECD patent database

Rationale

This indicator monitors innovation outcomes in the form of patents filed for inventions. The information contained patents can help indicate the innovative performance in European Research Area (ERA) countries. Patents can help protect inventions and aid businesses development to bridge the gap between ideas and actual implementation of innovative technologies.

Limitations

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.

Details on Methodology

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 the RECREATE 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.

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The indicator is relevant to the following innovation systems on this website

Water and waste water

Water is an essential resource for human livelihoods and the economy.