A.1 Methodology for patent analysis
Patent identification and mapping to a definition
Transforming a technology definition into a patent data collection is a crucial step when underetaking patent analysis. The most relevant aspect is the method of finding patents that fit the definition. The approach used in this report followed established guidelines, such as those provided by WIPO,
Data collection, patent counting
Simple patent families are counted as a proxy for individual inventions in the report. A simple patent family is a set of patents in various countries in relation to a single invention. The technical content covered is considered to be identical. All patent documents have the same priority date or combination of priority dates. The first publication by a member of a patent family counts as the publication year.
Most analysis in the report refers to numbers of patent families. Only published patent families have been studied.
Patent families generally include only patents and not utility models, without assessing their legal status.
The origin of the inventor (inventor’s location or residence) is used as a proxy for the source of innovations. For patents with multiple inventors, we count the different locations listed and count the location for multiple inventors of the same origin once.
Utility models have been excluded from the patent analysis in this report, because the regional differences and lower inventive threshold for utility models can affect the accuracy and relevance of the analysis.
A.2 Patent indicators
Patent application
To obtain a patent, an application must be filed at the appropriate IP office with all the necessary documents and fees. The IP office will conduct an examination to decide whether to grant or reject the application. Patent applications are generally published 18 months after the earliest priority date of the application. Prior to that publication, the application remains confidential.
Patent classification
Patent classification is a system for examiners of IP offices or other people to code documents, such as published patent applications, according to the technical features of their content. The International Patent Classification (IPC) is agreed internationally. The European Patent Office (EPO) and United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) launched a joint project to create the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) in order to harmonize the patent classifications systems between the two offices.
Patent applicant/owner
Patents are filed by an applicant, which can be an organization or a natural person. Applicants are not inventors, even if sometimes they are similar. The applicant is in most jurisdictions and in most cases published with the patent and remains always the applicant. The applicant is not automatically the owner of a patent at a given time, even if that is often the case. Patents can be transferred or sold, or the applicant itself can be sold as a company in a merger or takeover. Therefore the “owner” of a patent might change over time and is not always published. For proper analysis, to consolidate incorrect spelling and to include merger and acquisition information in the analysis, the report used the ultimate owner concept in the IFI Claims global patent database. The most probable entity was then named as owner.
Patent family
A patent family is a collection of patent applications covering the same or similar technical content and all sharing one or more priority documents. Families are used to count inventions and not several patents corresponding to the same subject matter and filed in different jurisdictions. There are several definitions of patent families, including simple and extended patent families, depending on the number of priority documents shared (ranging from one to all priority documents). Patent family members are the individual patents filed in those jurisdictions where a patent applicant is seeking patent protection (e.g., WIPO, EPO) and all publications in relation to these. In the present study, we counted simple patent families (using a representative patent family member for each patent family), unless otherwise specified.
Granted patent
Once examined by the IP office, an application becomes a granted patent or is rejected. If granted, the patent gives its owner a temporary right for a limited time period (normally 20 years) to prevent unauthorized use of the technology outlined in the patent. The procedure for granting patents varies widely between locations in according with national laws and international agreements. Note that in the same patent family, an application can be granted in one location and rejected in another.
Inventor country/location
The origin of the inventor (inventor’s location or residence) is used as a proxy for the source of innovation. For patents with multiple inventors, we counted the different locations listed and counted the location for multiple inventors of the same origin once. If no inventor address was available, the patent priority country/location was used as a proxy for the source of innovation.
Priority country/location
The first location in which a particular invention has a patent application filed, also known as the office of first filing.
Filing country/location
The filing country/location is the legal jurisdiction in which a member of a patent family filed a patent application to seek patent protection.
PCT (WO patent)
The Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) is an international patent law treaty concluded in 1970, administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), between more than 140 Paris Convention locations. The PCT makes it possible to seek patent protection for an invention simultaneously in each of a large number of locations by filing a single “international” patent application instead of filing several separate national or regional patent applications. The granting of patents remains under the control of the national or regional patent offices, which is referred to as the “national phase.”
European patent (EP patent)
A European patent can be obtained for all the European Patent Convention (EPC) locations by filing a single application at the European Patent Office (EPO). European patents granted by the EPO have the same legal rights and are subject to the same conditions as national patents (granted by anational patent office). A granted European patent is a “bundle” of national patents that must be validated at the national patent office to be effective in member locations. The validation process could include submission of a translation of the specification, payment of fees and other formalities at the national patent office. Once a European patent is granted, competence is transferred to the national patent offices. Other regional patents or procedures also exist: the Eurasian patent (EA), ARIPO patent (AP) for English- speaking Africa and OAPI patent (OA) for French-speaking Africa.
International patent family
An international patent family is defined as a patent family that has been filed and published in two or more jurisdictions (sometimes also known as foreign-oriented patent families or extended patent families). This contrasts with a domestic-only patent family or a non-international patent family, which consists of a patent family filed in only a single jurisdiction (often known as a “singleton”).
WIPO Patent Momentum Indicator
The WIPO Patent Momentum indicator assesses global patent activity across combinations of the four technology trends – Sustainable Propulsion, Automation and Circularity, Communication and Security, and Human–Machine Interface (HMI) – and the four principal transport modalities (Land, Sea, Air, and Space). This indicator highlights which trend-modality combinations have shown the strongest patent momentum over recent years, based on both activity levels and growth dynamics.
Calculation steps:
Patent activity level
Calculate the average annual number of patent families for each tech trend-modality combination from 2018 to 2023.
Normalize these values using a Z-score.
Patent activity dynamics
Determine the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of patent families for each combination over the same period.
Normalize the growth rates using a Z-score.
Total Patent Momentum score
Combine the normalized scores from the activity level and dynamics to obtain a total score for each trend-modality combination.
Innovation Maturity Matrix
The Innovation Maturity Matrix
Innovation intensity is measured by absolute number of published patent families (it is not limited solely to active patent families).
Recency measures quantitatively how recently patent applications were first filed for certain technologies. It is calculated by a weighted average of patent applications, whereby a higher weighting is given to inventions filed in more recent years. Relative recency refers to a normalized recency, where the recency of the overall future of transportation patent dataset is 1.
Recency formula:
where i = 1 for the first year of the survey period, and i increases by 1 for every subsequent year in chronological order; n is the total number of years of the survey period; and wi is the number of patent applications filed in the year i.
The four-quadrant matrix helps identify the following:
Emerging interest – areas with related patent families that have the most recent priority year, but are not yet large in volume. Such areas are emerging and gaining rapid industry traction.
Current hot topics – research areas that are the current industry focus and have a high number of accumulated patent families.
Mature sectors – areas with a high number of patent families, but which are no longer the current key focus, as most patent families were published in the relative past.
Modest development – areas that are not of recent focus and have a small number of filings. These could already have arrived at the final stage of the technology cycle, that is, at the decline stage; or else be areas that have been explored for a (relatively) long period of time, but had not gained traction at the time of the patent analytics report.
Relative Specialization Index
The Relative Specialization Index (RSI) compares the published patenting activity in two or more locations within the same technology area. RSI is a measure of a location’s share of patent families in a particular field of technology as a fraction of that location’s share of patent families in all fields of technology. It accounts for the fact that some locations file more patent applications than others in all fields of technology.
In other words, RSI has the advantage of providing a comparison of two locations’ patenting activity in a technology relative to those locations’ overall patenting activity. The effect of this is to highlight locations that have a greater specialism inthe technology area studied than expected from their overall level of patenting, and which might otherwise appear further down in the top inventor location lists, often unnoticed. A positive RSI value indicates that a location has a higher specialization in this field than would be expected, whilst a negative value indicates a lower specialization than expected for that location.
The Relative Specialization Index (RSI) is calculated as follows:
A.3 Patent searches
Full details of the patent search strategies used to define the technology areas analyzed in this report can be accessed and downloaded from the WIPO Technology Trends webpages.