Europe leads investment in R&D in the automotive sector with 62.6 billion euros compared to the United States (27.6), Japan (33.2) or China (18), according to 2021 data from R&D Scoreboard of the European Union. However, it suspends the application of an effective industrial property policy since the patent system is not being the protection vehicle in a sector where it is known that there is a high level of innovation aimed at the keys and challenges of the mobility of the future.
This is reflected in the report “Technological Map of Mobility 2023: the global race for technological sovereignty and industrial property”, prepared by Madrid IPR HelpDesk, a project of PONS Foundation with the support of the Community of Madrid, which has had the collaboration of experts from the consultancies PONS Mobility and PONS IP.
The causes that justify this trend, according to the study, are ignorance of the benefits associated with patent protection, the use of alternative measures such as industrial secrecy and innovation in the hands of companies with a lack of resources with great ideas, but in for which industrial property management is not a short-term priority.
Countries like China, Japan and the United States stand out both in the generation of inventions and potential markets of interest. Spain occupies a privileged position in the innovative panorama of the sector, although the number of families of patents generated in our country is well below the leaders mentioned above.
During the year 2021 Spain has registered 177 patent applications compared to the 126,000 that have been produced globally, which represents 0.14% of the total volume. The United States has 5,840 protection applications (4.63%) compared to Japan, with 9,487 (7.52%), and China, which leads the ranking with 87,047 registered patents, reaching 68.97% of the total, according to its own data. . These figures show that, despite being a highly innovative country, the companies involved in this drive towards new trends in the sector do not use the patent system as a protection tool. And it is that the technological sovereignty race is lost because it is not protected.
The x-ray for Spain is different if the comparison is made with European countries that are economically more similar to our country. Below our country are Portugal, with 13 patent applications, representing 0.01%, and Greece, with 10 (0.01%). Immediately above, Italy, with 306 applications (0.24%), United Kingdom, with 408 (0.32%). Further away from Spain are France, with 1,750 (1.39%) and Germany, with 8,654 (6.86%).
Isabel Marco, head of Innovation Projects at PONS IP and collaborator of the report, points out that “it is surprising how in Spain, a highly innovative country, the companies involved in this drive towards new trends in the sector do not use the patent system as a tool of protection”.
For his part, Luis Ignacio Vicente, Strategic Advisor of PONS IP, pointed out in his presentation that “a paradigm shift is opening up before us in which innovation projects, driven by R+D+i, have an enormous opportunity and the great responsibility of leading this urgent change as a country towards more sustainable mobility. It also represents a strategic opportunity as a country from the point of view of technological sovereignty and a change in the production model. The creation of a mobility industry is a great opportunity that Spain should not miss out on and industrial property is a key indicator of how we are and where we should be”, concluded Luis Ignacio Vicente.
Regarding the main players, the presence of companies in the automotive sector stands out in the TOP10, concentrating 6.5% of the total innovations in the sector in 2021. This reference group is represented by Honda Motor Co. Ltd., Toyota Jidosha KK, Robert Bosch GmbH, BMW AG, Toyota Motor, Great Wall Motor Co. Ltd., Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, Hyundai Motor Co., PSA Automobiles, and Ford Global Technology.
Finally, by focusing the focus on technologies aimed at implementing measures against climate change, it is noteworthy that half of the total volume of innovations published through patent documents has done so in the last three years. This denotes the exponential interest aroused by this subsector, which geostrategically presents the same profile as the global panorama with China, Japan and the United States at the forefront, and where Spain represents, once again, barely 0.6%.
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