Producing Patents

By making IP a category in the Scientific American Worldview Scorecard, we underscore the importance of this metric. To see how much of a country’s patenting involves biotechnology, we used data from the OECD’s Patent Database for 2005–2007. Among the countries on our scorecard, Denmark filed the highest percentage of biotech patents, but even that leading number only reached 2.22 percent, basically 2 patents out of 100. For the U.S., the percentage of biotech patents was 1.33, and China’s percentage was only 0.49 percent.

One key question is: Does the percentage of biotech patents correlate with a country’s overall innovation score? As our graph shows, it does not. Against the biotech-patent percentage plotted from highest to lowest, our overall innovation score jumps erratically, showing no definitive trend. In fact, several examples show that a country with a very low biotech-patent percentage can earn a high overall innovation score. For example, Japan, Sweden and Finland scored low biotech-patent percentages of 0.69, 0.68 and 0.49, respectively, and have high overall innovation scores of 26.39, 30.11 and 28.41. Perhaps this metric—the percentage of patents related to biotechnology—is too small in any country to correlate with its overall innovation in this field.

A country’s success in biotechnology in general might depend more on the patents that it generates in a specific area. For example, we gathered data from DrugPatentWatch.com and evaluated it to create a metric called “drug-patent inventorship” (for methodology, see Friedman, Y. 2010. Location of pharmaceutical innovation: 2000–2009. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 9:835–836). The results show that the U.S. far outruns the rest of the pack on this metric. Back in the pack, some of the higher scoring countries, however, also earned high overall innovation scores. For example, in 9th place on our overall innovation score, the U.K. came in second for drug-patent inventorship. With an 11th place spot on the overall innovation list, Japan was third in drug-patent inventorship. In general, most of the countries near the top of the list of drug-patent inventorship ended up at least above the middle-of-the road mark for overall innovation.

Regardless of how specific patent-related metrics compare to our overall innovation score, no one doubts the importance of patenting biotechnology information. To develop and grow a biotechnology industry, a country must create new technology and an environment that protects IP. Without such innovation and IP protection, a country can lose more biotechnology than it builds. As a nation generates more biotechnology patents, it should boost its existing products and technologies. Furthermore, developing patents for new drugs could be one of the most productive and profitable areas in all of biotechnology. This may be particularly evident in the coming years, as the healthcare industry expands to bring advanced treatments to more parts of the world.