Patents

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has just released it’s first-ever National Strategy for Inclusive Innovation in 2024, with support from the Council for Inclusive Innovation (CI2 ). The study includes a comprehensive review of the state of U.S. inclusiveness, highlights existing disparities, and explores opportunities to expand U.S. innovation in an equitable way. This strategy focuses primarily on innovation in STEM fields and the role of the patent system in the constitutional aim of incentivizing innovation and bringing that innovation to impact.

Click here for the full USPTO’s national strategy.

Invent Together, an alliance focused on broadening participation in inventing and patenting, published a new study in April 2024 titled “The Role of Trust in Advancing Equity in Innovation.” The study highlighted trust as a pivotal factor in an individual’s decision to pursue a patent for a new product or technology. The study identified significant trust gaps among women and people of color, which deter their participation in inventing and patenting. The study deepens our understanding of the barriers to equity in innovation and underscores the urgent need to build trust within the innovation ecosystem to safeguard U.S. global technology leadership.

Click here for the official press release and full study.

This document provides a synopsis of the online conversation that Innovation Council held with experts Dr. Malathi Lakshmikumaran and Dr. Axel Braun to discuss IGC developments and negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Click here for the one pager and to find the full transcript.

Innovation Council spoke online with experts Dr. Malathi Lakshmikumaran and Dr. Axel Braun to discuss IGC developments and negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Both are patent lawyers with scientific backgrounds who shared their insight about patent disclosure requirements (PDR) for inventions that are based on genetic resources (GR) and/or associated traditional knowledge (TK) in different countries. They drew attention to shortcomings of the so-called Chair’s text, which is the basis for the WIPO negotiations aimed at delivering a new WIPO international instrument setting forth a PDR. Drawing from their perspectives from both the biopharmaceutical and agriculture biotech sector, they discussed specific examples of problems that arise when PDR-related legislation is unclear.

Click here for the one-pager and for the full transcript.

In 2022, the European Patent Office (EPO) released this study providing evidence and insights on gender and patenting across Europe. The study reveals that just 13.2% of inventors in Europe are women. While the percentage has been steadily rising, there is clearly still work to be done to close the patenting gender gap.

This report presents data regarding gender and patenting across a wide range of countries, for different time periods, patent application profiles, and in different technology fields. The report indicates that the gender gap in relation to patenting could be harming technological progress, for European societies as a whole, given that the ingenuity of all people is not being fully leveraged. It recommends that policymakers enact policies and programs to close the gap and increase access to patents for female inventors.

Click here to read the report.

New research from WIPO about gender representation on PCT applications reveals that China has been able to grow the quantity of women inventors at nearly double the rate of the U.S. in recent decades, with 42% female inventors in China compared to 22% in the U.S. This Fortune article from Holly Fechner, the Executive Director of Invent Together, highlights the importance of utilizing the ideas and ingenuity of female inventors as well as those from other historically underrepresented groups, especially since global competition in technology is so intense and thus the stakes are high.

Click here to read the full article.

4iP have launched an ‘IP Stories’ podcast, looking at individuals’ unique perspectives on IP. 

We think they are great and definitely worth a listen!! 

Click here to listen to the podcasts 

Ahead of the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), the EPO launched a new Clean Energy platform designed to support researchers and decision-makers involved in the race for clean-energy technologies that contribute to the UN SDGs.

The platform provides an initial selection of some 60 ready-made smart patent information searches to help scientists, engineers and decision-makers find and build upon existing green tech solutions with greater ease.

Click here to read more.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office today released a new report, titled “Where are U.S. women patentees? Assessing three decades of growth.” The report examines women’s patenting by U.S. counties from 1990 through 2019. Over that 30-year period, women inventors patented in 411 new counties, an increase of 32% in the number of counties where women patent.