This is a guest contribution from Mike Lloyd of Patent-Insights. Mike previously contributed an article on the impact, from an Australian perspective, of COVID-19 on international patent, trade mark, and registered designs filings. Further details about the author can be found at the end of the article.
The Australian Federal Government on 1 October 2020 announced a renewed focus and A$1.5 billion investment in manufacturing, in particular in the following six target areas of technology:
- resources technology and critical minerals;
- food and beverages;
- medical products;
- recycling and clean energy;
- defence; and
- space.
The arguments put forward by the Government include wanting to ‘focus on areas of strength’ and wanting to avoid the lesson of ‘don’t try to do everything’.
There are merits in these arguments, and there are also arguments for letting market forces rather than governments select our area of strengths.
But because this is a patent blog, I want to ask whether patent data can help to find Australia’s areas of technology strength.
There are many ways we could ask this question, and the most obvious of these might be to look at overall patent filings. However, this is an imperfect method, as this data risks being corrupted by low quality patents, and there are many low quality patents out there.
Another approach is to look for highly-cited patents. The citing of a patent by another is generally a recognition that the cited patent has made a contribution to the patent literature, and therefore technology in general. The number of citations for a granted patent can range from zero to over a thousand, but as a simple rule, we could say that any granted patent with 50 or more forward citations is ‘highly-cited’. To put this into context, the commercial patent search database Patseer lists 8.4 million active and granted patent families (a family with one or more currently granted patents), but only 163,000 (1.9%) of these have 50 or more forward citations. In contrast, 5.1 million (61%) of granted patents have no forward citations at all.
These ‘highly-cited’ patents could be regarded as the most important patents, and the filers of these patents as leading applicants, i.e. strong in their area of technology. We could also argue that the more of these highly cited patents that companies have, the more they can be regarded as technology leaders in their space.