Elsevier

World Patent Information

Volume 28, Issue 3, September 2006, Pages 204-211
World Patent Information

Mapping nanotechnology patents: The EPO approach

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wpi.2006.03.005Get rights and content

Abstract

As a consequence of large public and private investments in new technologies at the nanoscale, an increase in the filing numbers of European and PCT patent applications related to nanotechnology is expected at the European Patent Office (EPO) in the coming years. A strategy has been devised to prepare the EPO for potential impacts this interdisciplinary emerging technology might have on workload per technical field, classification and search. A part of the strategy has been to create an internal working group on nanotechnology (NTWG) of patent examiners from different technical fields reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of this ‘size’ defined emerging field. First results of this NTWG are agreement within the EPO on a definition of nanotechnology and the creation of the corresponding tagging system Y01N which enables the monitoring of the evolution of patenting trends in this area of technology. The tags overcome the intrinsic difficulties in retrieving relevant patent publications from the huge amount of information contained in the EPO’s patent databases. In addition it is expected that access to Y01N via esp@cenet terms will simplify prior art search of nanotechnology patents and will support strategic decision making for economists, investors or funding agencies in nanotechnology.

Introduction

Emerging technologies with high growth rates can have a considerable impact on the EPO, as the examples of biotechnology and telecommunication have shown in the past. The explosive growth in patent applications in the nineties in these fields has put severe challenges to workload management and examiner recruitment in patent offices worldwide.

With this in mind, the EPO is developing strategies to be prepared for emerging technologies at an early stage in order to ensure that sufficient examiners with relevant technical and legal competence are available in areas with a strong increase in patent filings. In this way, the EPO can ensure that the best service possible is delivered, i.e., that high quality patents are granted in a reasonable time frame in order to reduce legal uncertainty for the applicants and to avoid unduly broad patent claims that could hamper the development of entire technical areas.

In 2004, about € 8 billion [1] were dedicated to investments in nanotechnology research and development, both by private and public sources (e.g., the 6th and 7th framework programme of the EU [2], the US national nanotechnology initiative [3]). In fact, nanotechnology is considered by many as one of the key technologies of this century with an expected market volume of one trillion dollars in 2015 [4]. It is likely that these R&D research efforts will yield an increasing number of nanotechnology related patent applications.

Nanotechnology is a technology at the atomic scale where the distinctions between quantum physics, molecular chemistry, material science and biotechnology become less relevant. This interdisciplinary nature poses specific challenges to patent offices since nanotechnology patents are filed for different, overlapping areas of technology. Hence it is important to monitor the growth of nanotechnology patents per technical area and the interdisciplinary overlap in order to address important issue such as search-file allocation, multidisciplinary classification schemes, efficient and complete prior art searches, substantive examination and examiner recruitment. It is not an easy task to identify nanotechnology patents. Some studies on scientific articles and patents on nanotechnology have already been performed in the past [5], [6], [7], and provide conclusions of a general nature.

To address the specific issues relevant to patent offices, the EPO, the USPTO [8] and the JPTO [9] have undertaken efforts to monitor nanotechnology patent trends in detail.

In this paper we present first results from the EPO with respect to the ongoing process of identifying and tagging nanotechnology based patents as well as data showing the current patent trends in different technological areas. Furthermore, the methodology for creating an EPO in-house monitoring and multidisciplinary tagging code Y01N for nanotechnology patents as part of this strategy is outlined.

Section snippets

General view on defining nanotechnology

Table 1 shows an overview of some definitions of nanotechnology as used by the scientific community, funding agencies and the intellectual property world. Definitions range from very narrow definitions (e.g., IPC1 and ECLA2 class B82) to very broad definitions including all sub-micrometer technologies. A survey of opinions of European researchers [10] also confirms a lack of consensus on what exactly nanotechnology is.

For example, some

Results

At the time of writing6, about 20 000 patent families7, representing more than 68 000 patent families, as well as about 20,000 non patent literature documents have been tagged as nanotechnology in one or more of the Y01N main-groups. Although currently this is only a small fraction of the

Conclusions

Faced with the challenges of a potential wave of interdisciplinary nanotechnology patents, the EPO has chosen a proactive approach. External knowledge about industry and governmental R&D funding programs has been merged with in-house technical expertise of EPO examiners to create a nanotechnology tagging system Y01N. The approach described in this paper has been applied to a specific field of technology, but it can be applied in the future to monitor other new multidisciplinary technologies.

In

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors. They should not be considered as necessarily the policy of the European Patent Office (EPO), or imply any commitment by the EPO to any particular course of action.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the fruitful collaboration with the NTWG members, the EPO classifiers, Paul Daeleman and Heiko Wongel of the EPO documentation department and Dr. G. Bachmann of the VDI–TZ.

Manfred Scheu graduated in physics and mathematics at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. From 1989 to 1991 he was responsible for applied research projects at the Medical Laser Centre Lübeck with an interdisciplinary team of biologists, physicists and physicians. Soon after joining the EPO as a patent examiner in optics, he came for the first time into contact with nanotechnology patent applications (scanning probe microscopes). In 2000 he passed the European Qualification Examination.

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Manfred Scheu graduated in physics and mathematics at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. From 1989 to 1991 he was responsible for applied research projects at the Medical Laser Centre Lübeck with an interdisciplinary team of biologists, physicists and physicians. Soon after joining the EPO as a patent examiner in optics, he came for the first time into contact with nanotechnology patent applications (scanning probe microscopes). In 2000 he passed the European Qualification Examination. Since 2003 he is the head of the Nanotechnology Working Group of the EPO, and since 2005 he is director of a search and examination department.

Victor Veefkind graduated in physical chemistry from Utrecht University, The Netherlands. After having obtained his Ph.D. in applied chemistry (University of Twente, The Netherlands) and authoring several scientific papers, he joined the EPO in 1999. He works as examiner in the fields of catalysis and high throughput experimentation and is a member of the EPO Nanotechnology Working Group.

Yves Verbandt received his Ph.D. in photonics from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Brussels, Belgium) in 1996. His post-graduate studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles involved cardiorespiratory physiology and telemedicine. In 2001, he joined the European Patent Office as a patent examiner in the field of guided-wave optics.

Enrique Molina Galan graduated as a biochemist at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and performed his Ph.D. studies in the field of protein characterisation. He has been an examiner at the EPO The Hague since 1990, in the field of nucleic acid (based) analysis. He was one of the first members of the working group on nanotechnology as an expert in nanobiotechnology, on which subject he has been an EPO speaker in conferences on patenting nanobiotechnology in Europe and the USA as well as presenting the subject several times at the well known EPO hosted Seminar for Applicants.

Richard Absalom was trained as electrical and electronic engineer in the Brighton, UK (BEng. MIEE). He joined EPO in 1989 as examiner in the field of error detection and correction in computers. He is the founder of Multimedia Working Group in 1995. He is a nanotechnology Working Group expert on Nanotechnology for information processing, storage and transmission (Y01N4/00) and Nanomagnetics (Y01N12/00).

Wolfram Förster is Head of Controlling Office of the European Patent Office, Munich/Germany. He leads all operational & strategic controlling tasks of the EPO. Furthermore, he coordinates patent-related economic studies in cooperation with international organisations and academic institutions as well as the R&D watch of emerging technologies such as nanotechnology and biotechnology.

He holds an M.Sc. in phytochemistry from the University of California, Irvine and a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical sciences (Pharmacy) from the University of Heidelberg.

In 1986, he joined the EPO in The Hague, working as an examiner searching patent applications in organic and pharmaceutical chemistry.

From 1991 until 1999, he worked in Munich as a substantive examiner in the field of second medical applications. In that period, he was actively involved in setting up a harmonised online search training for examiners in Munich.

From 1999 until 2003, he was leading a directorate working mainly in the field of second medical applications. In addition, he was actively driving the internal communication process in the examiner’s directorates.

From June 2003 until June 2004, he has been Principal Director in the examiner area of the EPO, put in charge of five technical areas in Munich, The Hague and Berlin, including biotechnology.

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