Innovation Indicators in the Financial Times

 

Matt Brocklehurst
Thomson Scientific
November 2005

This year the Financial Times, one of the world’s leading global business newspapers, has published regular features on global innovation. The patent analysis at the core of these features was supplied by Thomson Scientific, and offers interesting insights into the relative technological strengths of different countries and associated levels of innovation.

The basis of each Financial Times (FT) article was the Innovation Indicator — a table comparing total numbers of patent applications by country in 2004. Using Derwent AnalyticsSM, our data mining and visualization software tool for the desktop, enabled deeper analysis of these statistics, highlighting strengths and weaknesses in key industry sectors.
View the full Innovation Indicator ranking of 2004 patent applications

Japan

Comparison of total numbers of global patent applications in 2004 highlights the predominance of Japan: Japanese innovators filed 342, 726 patent applications that year — more than double the number filed by the USA (167, 183).

But these overall numbers do not tell the full story, because telecoms, IT and electronics account for close to half of Japanese applications in 2004. As the Financial Times explained, incremental innovations in these technologies are easier to discover and patent than in some other fields — helping boost significantly the total numbers of applications without necessarily representing dominance in all fields. In contrast, pharmaceutical and medical inventions represent a relatively smaller percentage of Japanese patent applications, despite Japan being a bigger market than the UK, Germany and France combined.
View the Japan FT feature here

Russia

Russia ranks number six in the Innovation Indicator table for 2004, comparing relatively well against countries of similar GDP. Chemicals, materials and instrumentation are the leading patented technologies, but Thomson Scientific’s analysis also shows a relative global strength in food and agriculture patent applications, as well as in energy and power — fields in which the government has been taking an active interest recently.
View the Russia FT feature here

Austria

Austria is one of the world’s richest countries in terms of GDP per head. Much of this wealth stems from inward investments from overseas companies and domestic sectors such as the timber and service industries not normally associated with high levels of patenting. Austria still ranks a respectable 18th in the Innovation Indicator table for 2004. A high level of automotive patents, related to Austria’s strength in car part exports to Germany, is key to the country’s ranking. Austria may rise higher in the ranking if the relatively low level of innovation in Telecoms, IT and electronics increases in future years.
View the Austria FT feature here

Spain

Spain ranks 15th in 2004 rankings of total patent applications. The Financial Times reports highly rated biotechnology research in agro-industry, medicine and alternative fuels, but a lack of experience and seed funding for commercial development. This is represented in the patenting statistics: Spain had just a 0.16% share of European patents in 2004, despite a biotechnology sector that is growing four times faster than the European average.
View the Spain FT feature here

China

China is eager to innovate and holds its own in the Innovation Indicator, in fifth place behind Japan, the USA, South Korea and Germany. Like Japan, over 40% of China’s patent applications in 2004 were in the telecoms, IT and electronics sector. China’s increasing focus on intellectual property1 is viewed as key to further development of their economy, and will be watched with interest by industry worldwide. It will be interesting to see if China leapfogs any of the top four in coming years.
View the China FT feature here

Tools for taking patent analysis further

In 2006 Thomson Scientific will introduce Thomson Data Analyzer, the powerful successor to our Derwent Analytics desktop tool.

User-friendly and flexible, Thomson Data Analyzer provides an easy way to analyze trends, profile competitors and identifying strategic development opportunities from patent and scientific information. You can use this tool to extract business-critical insights from both in-house or commercial databases including Derwent World Patents Index®, Delphion®, MicroPatent® PatentWeb, Web of Science® and Aureka®.