Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
natural phenomena (Although inventive uses or modifications of natural phenom-
ena, including isolated DNA and transgenic organisms, are patentable in some juris-
dictions). Finally, inventions must be, to a certain extent, 'reduced to practice' to be
patent eligible. As a result, patents best represent activity at the 'proof-of-concept'
and 'early development' stages of the R&D pipeline.
One complication in using patents as an R&D indicator is the fact that patents are
national or, at best, regional. An invention may be represented by a single patent ap-
plication and granted patent in just one national or regional jurisdiction (such as the
United State Patent and Trademark Office or the European Patent Office), or it may
be represented by multiple patent applications and grants in multiple jurisdictions.
The extent and scope of filing depends upon the applicant and their choice of where
to seek protections. The set of patent documents in one or more jurisdictions, claim-
ing a common invention and the same (set of) priority date(s), is called a 'patent
family', and is catalogued by INPADOC, an international patent data service of the
European Patent Office. It is useful to track patent families rather than individual
patent documents, if one is interested in the actual rate at which inventions are being
made in the R&D pipeline.
Two advantages of using patents as R&D indicators are that patent documents are
fairly standardized, and thus represent reasonably comparable quantum of knowl-
edge, and that they can be observed across countries. However, patents are to some
degree, less universal and more biased—geographically, institutionally, and techno-
logically—than are scientific articles. Patents are, after all, historically a commer-
cial instrument that arose from Western (Italian and English) legal traditions. Thus,
patents will tend to over-represent inventions from higher income countries, by
private sector inventors, and in molecular or transgenic technologies. Innovations
at a comparable point in the R&D pipeline from lower income countries, being de-
veloped by public sector institutions, and using a breeding approach are less likely
to show up in the patent literature. Nevertheless, in seeking to understand the com-
mercialization processes, patents, especially when queried randomly, do provide a
representative cross section of what is in the R&D pipeline.
To identify just those patents (and thereby underlying inventions) related to the
biology of stress tolerance in plants, the Derwent World Patent Index database was
queried using the same keywords used to search the scientific literature, in com-
bination with specific International Patent Class indices to narrow the search to
plant biology. A total of 13,213 patent documents from 60 different countries were
identified, which altogether represented 2,769 patent families. In this dataset, patent
families consist of 1 to 153 patent documents (with an average of 2.5).
The top jurisdictions in which patents are being filed are listed in Table
1.3
. The
United States has the most patent documents filed, but also the most patent families
represented among its filings. Notably, quite a number of the patent families repre-
sented in the dataset, at least 1,650 out of the 2,769, are unique to a single jurisdiction.
(For example, the United States had 804 such inventions, largely corn and soybean
varieties which are patentable in the US but not elsewhere.) The remainder, of no
more than 1,120 patent families, represents the subset of stress-tolerance-related in-
