Fast-tracking Green Patent Applications: An Empirical Analysis

Antoine Dechezlepretre

Abstract
AI

This research examines the impact and effectiveness of fast-tracking patent applications for green technologies within the context of climate change. Despite the recognition of intellectual property rights (IPRs) as a contentious issue in technology transfer for climate change mitigation, this analysis reveals that fast-tracked applications predominantly focus on green technologies. The study suggests extending accelerated examination processes to non-green technologies to enhance overall innovation and technology transfer.

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Table 1: Description of green patent fast-track programmes * Note: the USPTO programme was temporary and closed after the 3,500th application was received for this scheme. biology, high-end equipment manufacturing, and new material. Patent applicants must provide a search report together with the request for accelerated examination. Applications accepted under the programme

Table 2: Number of patents under each of the fast-track programmes To assess the success of the programmes, Table 3 further compares the number of annual fast- track requests to the annual number of green patents” filed in each patent office (column 3) and to the total annual number of patent applications filed (column 5). Two results stand out. First, as can be expected, the number of patents requiring accelerated examination under the green patent programmes represent a tiny share of total patent filings in each patent office: between 0.05% in Australia and 0.90% in the UK. Second, only a small share of green patents chooses to request accelerated examination. The figures range from less than 1% of green patents in Australia to over 20% in the UK. The US and Israel stand in between with respectively 8% and 13% of the average number of green patents filed annually requesting accelerated examination. The proportion is between 1% and 2% in Canada, Japan and Korea. This suggests that either patent applicants are unaware of the existence of the programmes, or that it is not always in their best interest to request accelerated examination. We will explore this last point in the next subsection.

Note: the numbers are the author’s own calculations based on the PATSAT database Source: author Table 3: Number of annual patents in the fast-track programmes as a share of green and total patents 3.2 Understanding the Low Usage Rate of Fast-Tracking Programmes

The distribution of patents by technology type is presented in Figure 1 for the five countries for which detailed data could be obtained:

the five countries is presented in Annex 1.

Interestingly, there are more solar patents in the UK programme than wind patents.

Table 4: Time-to-grant for fast-track programmes compared with the regular examination process 4.3 The Value of Fast-Track Patents patents and that of otherwise similar but Do fast-track patents differ from non-fast-track patents, in particular environmental ones? We will investigate this issue by looking at three different measures of patent value: the number of countries in which each patent has been filed (also called the family size of patents), the likelihood of becoming a “triadic” patent and the number of claims made in the patent. It has been empirically demonstrated that the number of countries in which a patent is filed is correlated with other indicators of patent value (see, for example, Lanjouw et al, 1998, Harhoff et al, 2003). International patent families also have the advantage of being rapidly available to researchers, as patent applicants must file all foreign extensions of a patent at most thirty months after the first (priority) patent has been filed. Another widely used measure of patent value is to focus on so-called triadic patents, i.e. patents taken out in all three of the world’s major patent offices: the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japan Patent Office and the United States Patents and Trademark Office. Triadic patents have been used extensively as a way to focus on high-value patents (Dernis, Guellec and van Pottelsberghe, 2001; Dernis and Khan, 2004).

for green patents at the UK and the US patent offices in the last few years, we found that domestic applicants were much more likely to participate in the fast-tracking programmes than foreign applicants were. 62% of green patent applications at the UK patent office were filed by domestic applicants. At the USPTO, domestic applicants filed only 50% of green patent applications. This suggests that foreign applicants might be unaware of the existence of these programmes. This is also ikely the result of applicants only wanting to expedite the first application, which is usually filed in their home country. That first application filed will probably be prosecuted by the person who originally drafted the case. Since that practitioner may have the best overall context for the patent application, he/she may be in a better position to make the most strategic amendments.” This potential explanation is supported by the observation that, among all the US and UK fast-track patents, we did not find a single pair of patents belonging to the same international patent family.

that the patents are being transferred by Chinese and Indian multinational companies. Multinational companies very often let their patent filings be handled by the local subsidiary. Therefore, looking at the location of applicants may fail to uncover all cross- border patent transfers. To mitigate this issue, we examined the country of residence of inventors instead, as reported on patent applications. The breakdown is shown on Figure 3 (a more detailed breakdown is available in Annex 3).

What share of their patent portfolio do fast- track patents represent? In Figure 5, we showed the proportion of patents in their current portfolio for which companies* have requested accelerated examination. We found that, while only 20% of companies

Figure 5 - Share of fast-track procedures in the patent portfolio

Figure 6 - Fast-track users and non-users in terms of revenue and assets The fact that most applicants systematically choose to request the accelerated procedure while only a few use it on an ad-hoc basis suggests that companies joining the pro- gramme might differ in some manner from companies that do not. In order to look at this issue, the data on patents filed at the UK IP office was matched with the ORBIS worldwide financial information database. This allowed us to obtain detailed information on the patent applicants, including assets, revenue and employment. Users of the programme (for at least one patent) were then compared with non-users (as defined by all other applicants of green patents” at the UK IP office) in terms of revenue, assets, number of employees and size of the patent portfolio. We found evidence that fast-track users differ statistically from non-users in that they tend to have smaller revenues and smaller but faster-growing assets. In other words, the fast-tracking programme seems to appeal particularly to start-up companies in the green technology sector that are currently raising capital but still generating small revenue. Figure 6 illustrates this result by plotting the population of green patent holders against revenue and assets and distinguishing between users and non-users?’ of the fast-tracking programme. This shows that fast-track users are overrepresented in the lower-left corner of the graph. The reason for this is that patents are more critical to the survival of start-up companies than to that of laroer. established companies. for this is that patents are more critical to the

Figure 7 - Asset growth of systematic fast-track users, occasional users and non-users Figure 8 - Revenue of systematic fast-track users, occasional users and non-users

Table A1 - Distribution of patents by technology - Australia Table A2 -Distribution of patents by technology - Canada

Table A4 - Distribution of patents by technology - US Table A3 -Distribution of patents by technology - UK

Table A5 - Distribution of patents by technology - Israel

Notes: *=significant at the 10% level, **=significant at the 5% level, ***=significant at the 1% level. The dependent variable is the number of patent offices in different countries in which a patent is filed (family size) in columns (1) and(2) and the number of claims made by each patent in columns (5) and (6). Columns (1) and (5)are estimated by Poisson pseudo- maximum likelihood and columns (2) and (6) are estimated by negative binomial maximum likelihood. The dependent variable is a dummy variable that takes on the value of 1 if the patent is triadic in columns (3) and (4). Column (3) is estimated by probit and column (4) is estimated by logit. All equations include 166 dummy variables for each office -the application month, a dummy variable for “green” patents according to the EPO classification and a constant. Robust standard errors are in parentheses. Table A7 — Patent quality

Table A8 — Knowledge diffusion Notes: *=significant at the 10% level, **=significant at the 5% level, ***=significant at the 1% level. The dependent variable is the total number of citations received by each patent in columns (1) to (3) and the number of citations received by each patentand made by applicants only in columns (4) to (6). All columns are estimated by Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood. All equations include 166 dummy variables for each office -the application month, a dummy variable for “green” patents according to the EPO classification and a constant. Robust standard errors are in parentheses.

Table A9 -Nationality of applicants - UK

Table A10 - Nationality of applicants - US

Table A11 - Nationality of inventors - US