Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 1.3   Number of total patent documents and count of patent families by jurisdiction. (Data
Sources: Derwent World Patent Index and INPADOC, Thomson Innovation 2011)
Country
Total patent
documents in the
jurisdiction
Patent families
represented in the
jurisdiction
Patent families
unique to the
jurisdiction
US
United States
3,759
1,553
804
WO
WIPO applications
1,858
893
73
EP
Europe
1,432
568
4
AU
Australia
1,190
647
59
CN
China
958
660
358
CA
Canada
731
515
2
JP
Japan
545
347
19
DE
Germany
316
165
2
MX
Mexico
290
269
103
BR
Brazil
232
166
7
AR
Argentina
209
182
0
KR
Korea
208
150
26
IN
India
188
188
187
AT
Austria
173
127
0
ZA
South Africa
133
100
1
ventions that are protected in more than one jurisdiction. Of these international patent
families, only a few hundred involve multiple patent filings across many jurisdictions.
The rate of invention is represented in Fig. 1.2b . The annual rate of new patented
inventions has grown significantly since 2005. There was a notable dip in new in-
ventions in 2007 and 2008, but the growth recovered in 2009 and 2010.
We can also note that the magnitude of patenting is significantly smaller than
that of publishing, at a ratio of around one quarter to one third. This largely reflects
the selection or winnowing of the R&D process: Not all research findings trans-
late into patentable inventions. The ratio of patenting to publishing observed here
is somewhat lower than the norm observed across all fields of technology. (As a
benchmark, in 2008 the US patent office granted 80,048 patents while the Web of
Science reported 202,037 articles published; exhibiting a ratio of 0.4). This also
suggests that a significant share of the knowledge generated and published remains
in the public domain.
The involvement of the private sector is much greater in patenting in publish-
ing (comparing panel b with panel a in a Fig. 1.2 ). Further investigation of those to
whom these inventions are assigned (Fig. 1.4 ) shows that the private sector accounts
for 66 % of patent families in the dataset, while the public sector accounts for 29 %.
The ratio between public and private deviates significantly from the norm, given that
all fields of technology the public sector accounts for is less than 3 % of patenting
activity. Prior analysis has shown the public sector accounted for about 25 % of the
patents in the field of plant biotechnology up through 2000 (Graff et al. 2003 ).
The degree of concentration of patent holdings in the private sector is also ap-
parent in Fig. 1.4 . The top five patent assignees own 44 % of the stress-tolerance re-
lated inventions. Recall, however, that 809 (or fully 29 %) of the patent families are
 
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