A report released last week by the Center for Advancing Innovation and PatSnap shows the US and the EU are falling behind on the number of patents filed.

Brazil may not be the first country that comes to mind when thinking of nations that are good at turning patent applications into granted patents, yet a report published last week by the Center for Advancing Innovation, a non-profit that aims to accelerate tech transfer, and intellectual property analytics and management platform PatSnap put the south American country on a list with four other more or less likely candidates – China, Singapore, Israel and India – for demonstrating the most patent effectiveness between 2005 and 2015. The Innovation Arms Race 2018 report is bad news for the US and the EU, which both appear to be losing the game. The US had already lost its leadership in global patenting metrics and the report predicted that the country would lose its leadership across all key performance indicators by 2029, according to the report. Ray Chohan, senior vice-president for corporate strategy at PatSnap, explained that “despite recent obstacles to globalisation, innovation continues to become more relevant to technological progress, and in return – economic progress. “While the west has – to a significant extent – pioneered technological breakthroughs in the past, it is being held back by legacy processes and technology when it comes to innovation and turning it into economic gain. Much of the growth and efficiency we are seeing in R&D in Asia-Pacific is being supported by companies leveraging new technologies and processes with the aim of streamlining their R&D investment.” Indeed, the money going to research and development activities across the world continued to increase – as Rob Lowe, chief executive of innovation management software producer Wellspring Worldwide, recently also noted in a keynote speech at the UIDP26 conference, the global annual market for R&D dwarfed everything else, with even alcohol and tobacco only accounting for $120bn. The Innovation Arms Race 2018 report put the figure at $2.19 trillion in 2018. Yet money does not equate success. The returns on R&D expenditure, the report stated, had actually decreased by approximately 65% over the past three decades. While not all research and development can lead to a usable product or service, the fact that near 65% produced no economic value whatsoever is worrying. Part of the problem was a declining ability in the western world to turn R&D into effective patents. Despite the fact that the number of applications remained high, the US and the EU had both been struggling to turn these applications into granted patents. Both sides of…

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