Creating 'Inside Green Innovation: Progress Report 2021'

Green innovation can be conceived as any technology aimed at limiting negative environmental impact created by human activity. Such green innovation could include technologies that help eliminate pollution, use resources more sustainably, handle waste more responsibly, recycle used materials more widely, or identify alternatives to fossil fuels. There are countless areas that we could have explored in our inaugural report. To give us a starting point, we have focused on what we judged to be some of the most pressing and widely relatable issues facing us today: plastics, food production and energy in the renewable age. These areas were chosen for their current relative prominence in the global green innovation conversation, as referenced in the OECD’s and United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Green Innovation Database, a ‘global innovation catalogue that connects needs for solving environmental or climate change problems with sustainable solutions’. Our insights are based on patent filing analytics produced using a proprietary patent analytics platform in combination with industry assessments and our experience as patent attorneys. The search criteria were developed using combinations of keywords and classifications. Varying filters were applied to the datasets during analysis, to pull-out points of interest in combination with the application of patent attorney judgement and the assessment of individual patent filings. This report emphasises trends and specific points of interest uncovered. The objective was not to achieve exhaustive filing statistics for subject areas or assignees.

Many of the charts in this report will appear to show a drop in patent filing numbers in 2020. This drop does not necessarily reflect reduced filing numbers for 2020. Due to an 18-month lag between the filing and the publication of a patent application, data from 2020 only includes data through May 2020. A pro-rated estimation of the patent filing activity in 2020 may be made from the number of filings to-date to give an early indication how the filing trend may be progressing. The small amount of data available from 2021 due to early published patent applications has not been reported. Several countries have systems that reward patent filing in home countries for reasons other than or additional to innovation, such as tax benefits for the applicant or academic reputation. We have attempted to filter out these priority filings. In particular, incentives offered in China over the last decade have led to unprecedented high levels of patent filing activity there. In many fields, the number of year-on-year patent filings originating in China can be ten times the number originating in the rest of the world combined. An unusually high proportion of these filings do not extend beyond China, and more anecdotally, they have been found to have unusually narrow claims. All these factors indicate that the vast majority of China-originating filings may have been driven by state-offered incentives. For these reasons, where appropriate we have either filtered out some of these priority filings or assessed the filings separately. Many of the incentives in China have recently been removed. It will be interesting to see how this influences patent filing activity in China in the coming years.