Russian Intellectual Property Market Trends
A new issue of the Science, Technology and Innovation newsletter presents data on Russian and international applicants’ patent filing at the Federal Intellectual Property Service (Rospatent).
The newsletter’s data sources include the Federal Intellectual Property Service (Rospatent) and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) publications, and the HSE ISSEK calculations.
At the beginning of 2016 Russia was the world’s eighth largest intellectual property market. 45.5 thousand patent applications for inventions were filed at the national patent office — the Federal Intellectual Property Service (Rospatent), more than a third of them (16.3 thousand) by foreign applicants. Among non-residents, the highest patenting activity showed applicants from the US (almost 5 thousand patent applications for inventions), Germany (2 thousand), Japan (1.5 thousand), France (1.1 thousand), the Netherlands (1 thousand) and Switzerland (920).
International companies’ interest in the Russian intellectual property market has significantly increased during the previous decade: in 2005–2015 the number of foreign patent applications filed in the country grew on average by 8.1% annually. The relevant figure for Russian applications was only 2.8%. Due to mismatched increase of residents’ and non-residents’ patent activities, the latter’s share of the total number of patent applications filed in Russia grew from 26.7% in 2005 to 35.7% in 2015 (figure 1). This was accompanied by the technological dependence coefficient’s growth.
Medical technologies-related inventions were the most actively patented ones in 2015 (7.4% of all applications filed in Russia), followed by instrumentation technologies and equipment (6.7%), food chemistry (6.1%), and civil construction (5.8%). The lowest number of applications were filed in the following areas: management and administration information technologies (0.5%), microstructure and nanotechnologies (0.6%), basic communication processes (0.7%), semiconductors (0.7%), and paper and textile production and processing machinery (0.8%).
The technological areas structures of patent applications filed by residents and non-resident are quite different (figure 2). Russian developers are leading in such intellectual property market segments as basic communication processes, semiconductors, instrumentation technologies and equipment, analysis of biomaterials, food chemistry, materials, and metallurgy. In microstructure and nanotechnologies Russian applicants have filed more than 90% of all patent applications for inventions in 2015.
In certain technology areas Russian developers are obviously lagging behind. E.g. more than 80% of patent applications related to digital communication technologies and equipment were filed in 2015 by non-residents. International applicants also dominate the Russian intellectual property market for audio-visual technologies, organic fine chemistry, and several other industries.