The production of innovation is once again going from strength to strength in Spain. The European Patent Office (OOP) registered last year 1,954 applications to protect inventions from Spain, a volume 8.9% higher than in 2020, which also represents the greatest advance in a decade. Although this is largely due to the fact that the pandemic had slowed down activity the previous year, the almost two thousand new patents also improve the pre-Covid figures.
In addition, the collection of data published this Tuesday by the entity shows that activity in Spain is growing at a much higher rate than in the whole of the European Union, where the improvement is 2.7%. In total, also taking into account requests from countries such as the United States -who lead the ranking- or China, Which is among the top five countries with the greatest weight, the EPO has processed 188,600 patents, 4.5% more than in 2020, again less progress than Spain.
In inner key, Catalonia it is once again the community that executes more processes of this style. They were, last year, around 650 patents, which means a third of the total and an increase of 17% compared to last year. Autonomy is shared with Madrid and the Basque Countryalmost two thirds of the patents registered in Spain, a trident that has been repeated for years.
“The strong demand for patents last year shows that innovation has remained solid”, analyzes the president of the EPO, Antonio Campinos, it’s a statement. “The strong growth of digital technologies provides compelling evidence of the digital transformation taking place across all sectors and industries,” he continues.
healthcare technology
The global radiography indicates precisely that the sector from which the most inventions came was digital communication, with more than 15,400 in total, very close to the registration of patents related to medical technology (15,321) and computer technology (14,671). In Spain, however, things change: pharmaceutical innovation wins, which is approximately 10% of the total and the productive sector that registers the most patents, followed by electrical machinery (8.4%), medical technology (7 .5%) and biotechnology (7.2%).
Specifically, the entity points out in a statement, health technologies “now represent approximately a quarter of all patent applications at the Spanish EPO.” In this line, the Superior Council of Scientific Investigations (CSIC) retains its role as the organization that concentrates the most registration processes (4% of the total), far behind the technology group Amadeus and Autotech Engineering (of the group Gestamp), which complete the podium.
However, the global list reflects that the leadership is in Asia: the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei was the top patent applicant at the EPO in 2021 (as was already the case in 2019), followed by last year’s leader, Samsungand by LGboth from South Korea.