Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In 2004, the USPTO has classified nanotechnology in class 977
241
under 35
USC ยง8 (Classification of Patents), the European Patent Office (EPO) has
placed a Y01N for nanotechnology, and the. International Patent Classification
has given it under the B82B class.
242
For a patent to be issued, it has to pos-
sess the following: 1) novelty, 2) inventive step, and 3) industrial application.
242
Existing knowledge is known as the state of the art and novelty assumes that
the invention is not a part of- or cannot be derived from the state of the art in
its field. To satisfy the inventive step, the invention must not logically follow
from what is already known. The industrial application requirement refers to
the applicability of the invention to satisfy a need in a particular industry sector.
The Japan Patent Office (JPO) has also made efforts to improve their classi-
fication systems to collect all nanotechnology-related patents in one single pat-
ent class: they have created the JPO created ZNM.
243
Because the identification
of nanotechnology patents requires elaborate work, a nanotechnology working
group (NTWG) was created in 2003 at the EPO. This group first worked on the
definition of nanotechnology and appropriate keywords to be able to distinguish
an application in the area.
244
This led to the analysis of patent applications from
15 countries or organizations and were analyzed resulting in the identification
of about 90,000 patent or non-patent literature documents out of 20 M docu-
ments belonging to class Y01N.
244
The patent applications submitted directly to
the EPO or filled via the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) were used to create
the database that included citation information
245
that are very useful for explor-
ing trajectories of technological development and the influence of technologies
on successive inventive activities.
246
The nanotechnology patent applications worldwide showed a steady
increase in the United States and the European Union, showing an average
annual increase of 12% between 1986 and 1996; and in 1977, it went to 18%
for the US and 19% for the EU applications that was mainly due to Germany.
243
Japan showed a steady increase until late 1980s, followed by a decline of about
6% a year between 1990 and 1994 which was the period of the collapse of the
Japanese asset price bubble.
243
From 1995, growth in nanotechnology patent
applications growth rate was recorded at 12% which is still lower than that of
US and EU applications. Korea has shown an average annual growth rate from
1999 to 2001 that is approximately 40% which are seen in registrations at the
USPTO.
247
From 1996 to 2003, the number of world nanotechnology-related
patents registered with USPTO has increased by 217% while the increase of
the number of patents in all fields has increased only by 57%.
247
The nano-
technology patents of US origin accounts for by an additional 3700 nanotech-
nology patents per year, or by 230% that may be attributed to the upsurge in
the US nanotechnology R&D budget from $116 M in 1997 to $270 M in 2000
and $960 M in 2004.
247
In 2003, the biggest number of patents in nanotechnol-
ogy was held by US (61% of the total of 8630), followed by Japan (10.9%),
Germany (8.1%), Canada (2.9%), and France (2.2%) with substantial activities
from Korea, Netherlands, Ireland, and China.
247
