Patents zoom, but where is the innovation?

It was party time for India in November when the “World Intellectual Property Indicators 2023” (WIPI) report was released. India was a star performer in the report compiled by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), which aggregates statistics culled from around 150 intellectual property offices worldwide to map global patenting activity. According to WIPI, this activity soared to record levels in 2022, fuelled by the substantial rise in patent filings by residents of China and India.

News of this kind invariably fans nationalist tendencies these days, and the media went to town on it, although these are figures for just applications and not grant of patents. Coming up for special mention was the WIPI observation that patent applications in India grew by 31.6 per cent in 2022, “extending an 11-year run of growth unmatched by any other country among the top 10 filers”. Quite a feat, it would appear, when you look at the leading group. The top filers — these are the countries with the highest numbers of patent filings — are China, the US, Japan, Republic of Korea and Germany, followed by France, India, the UK, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Figures hide as much as they reveal; it all depends on the context and how much one wants to understand the big picture. Spectacular increases in percentages are possible on a low base figure, but not if one is already far ahead in the race. China is the world’s largest patent holder, and it continues to file nearly half of all global patent applications. With close to 1.6 million applications last year, it managed to notch up an increase of just 3.1 per cent in 2022. China was followed by the US with 505,539 applications, Japan (405,361), the Republic of Korea (272,315) and Germany (155,896). Applications in India were in the region of 77,000.

If you take India out of the top 10 league, its growth comes across as more sedate. WIPI says this is the “sixth year of growth” in a row for the country, with patent filings in 2022 showing the fastest increase since 2005. But then, 2022 was a record-breaking year globally, with innovators filing an amazing 3.46 million patent applications and cementing the post-COVID recovery in such activity.

The Narendra Modi government sets great store by patenting activity and has been working on streamlining the Indian Patent Office (IPO). It has fast-tracked patent approvals for some categories and even made patenting fees less onerous for others. A few days after the WIPI report on applications, Union Minister for Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal announced on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that the IPO had set a record by granting the “highest” number of patents in this fiscal year — a total of 41,010 — till November 15. Responding to this, Prime Minister Modi said it was “notable and it marks a milestone in India’s journey towards an innovation-driven knowledge economy”.

What do patent figures portend? Is it that a society is innovative and can make breakthroughs that are life-changing? According to one view, the dominant view, technological advancement is closely bound with innovation, and is said to be the reason why many of the most innovative countries are among the top technologically advanced, too. If one goes by patent profiles, China is certainly leading the technology advancement in almost all of the frontier areas — from 5G and 6G to artificial intelligence (AI). In the case of AI, for instance, it dominates the patent landscape so overwhelmingly that it dwarfs all others. In the latest listing of the top patent holders by Statista, which puts out data across 170 industries, there were eight companies that held the largest number of patents covering active machine learning and AI. Of these, five were Chinese. The chart is a telling reflection of the focus and depth the Chinese bring to their research and development (R&D), by both private companies and state-owned enterprises. As of December 2022, Baidu was the largest owner of AI patent families worldwide, with 13,993 active patent families, according to Statista. Baidu is a Chinese multinational technology company specialising in Internet-related services, products, and artificial intelligence. It was followed by Tencent, a technology and entertainment giant based in Shenzhen, with 13,187 active patent families. India has no such companies of the size and power of these two, nor does it have the kind of science and technology culture in its national research institutes that China boasts. This explains why it is missing altogether from the global scene.

The most surprising feature of this listing is how China has straddled the patent space here, with corporate behemoths to scientific research organisations competing for patents — and in disparate sectors of the economy. In third place is a state-owned utility, State Grid Corporation of China, better known as State Grid, which is an electric utility corporation that supplies power to over 1.1 billion people and covering a staggering 88 per cent of China’s national territory. It also owns and operates overseas assets across the world, from the Philippines to Brazil, Australia and Italy. But there is something more unique to this capture of AI technology by one country. In fourth place is the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) which is China’s top consultancy for the sciences and technology. CAS is the world’s largest research network with 100 R&D institutes, three universities and around 69,000 scientists and technologists working for it. It has an enviable reputation, having been consistently ranked among the top global research outfits.

Another example is 5G technologies. Although the Union government regularly says we are making headway, there is little to show. China, on the other hand, has gone far ahead and is already leading the field in 6G patents. The latest news from Nikkei Asia is that around 20,000 patent applications have been filed by China for AI, base stations, quantum technology and communications.

How can India hope to take on such formidable competition? The nearest we have is the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), with its network of 37 laboratories and an equal number of outreach centres, but its ability to come up with breakthroughs is questionable. Hopefully, the uptick in India’s patent filings is reflective of the changing research culture.

This was first published in the 16-31 December, 2023 print edition of Down To Earth

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