Asia, the new “innovative epicenter” of the planet
For WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) it is time to take stock and, as every year, it creates a report with the numbers of intellectual property in the world.
Compared to previous years, however, something has changed. What’s different about the new report?
Innovative activity has overcome the interruption of the pandemic and in 2021 global intellectual property filing services for patents, trademarks and designs have increased to record levels!
In the new WIPO report, therefore, there has been a general growth in the numbers of intellectual property.
And this analysis confirmed the actual resilience of the IP rights sector despite the global economic recession connected to the pandemic situation. In addition, it also reported some really surprising results for different reasons.
First of all, some numbers are extremely positive: regarding the filing of trademarks, there was a growth of +13.7% compared to 2019. The sectors of patent filing (+1.6%) and design filing (+2%) also grew.
The data indicated above, however, revealed something curious.
Both regarding the filing of trademarks and patents, in fact, it has been found that the “innovative epicenter” of the planet is located in Asia.
Asia, America, Europe: some data in comparison
In 2020, the Chinese IP Office received 1.5 million patent applications, 2.5 times higher than the US Patent Office. Two-thirds of applications submitted worldwide were directed to offices located in Asia, particularly in China. Also for the trademark filing, a large part of the activity took place at asian offices (71.8% of the activity globally).
In Europe, as in America, the situation is declining: in fact, the share of activity in the Offices in Europe has progressively decreased, from 34.1% in 2010 to 14.7% in 2020.
Lower data for Europe are also recorded regarding to industrial design applications: while the Chinese IP Office received 55% of the world total of applications, in Europe, if in 2010 31.5% of global applications were submitted to their offices, in 2020 this share fell to 22.1%.
Will America and Europe be able to keep up with the Asian giant?
At the moment the data speak clearly and, in order to understand how things will evolve, we will have to wait for the next WIPO report.
But surely, compared to many other sectors that have suffered serious losses due to the pandemic, the intellectual property sector proves to have incredible resilience and to be increasingly able to maintain its economic relevance globally.
Only good news for IP rights! To find out more about Tutelio and its battles in defense of copyright and intellectual property click here.
