Annex 5: Patent Profiling – Methodology and detailed results Methodology In terms of the methodology used for patent profiling, the online database Espacenet was screened with keywords. Furthermore, the database of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was also searched for European inventors in a complementary search strategy. Full access to both databases is obtained via the frontend DEPATIS external client, which enables a search of the complete collection including full texts of European published applications. Regional databases of the different countries in Europe were not consulted due to the assumption that all important regional patents are also patented internationally. This approach provides a more accurate measure of the level of inventive activity from a company within the technical space, and a truer picture of the overall level of innovation. Keywords have been defined, a reviewed dataset has been generated136 and the planned evaluation of the dataset137 has been conducted. The basic search contained the word “marine” in combination with organisms and the application or basic product, and all European countries of the patent applicant, the inventor and the country where the earliest filing of a patent application is claimed (priority country). For evaluation of the patents, all hits were transferred into PATBASE – a database allowing full-text searching in patents of all countries, which has excellent options for statistical analysis. The current results include information on the distribution of patents between the Blue Biotechnology sub-sectors and across the main classification of patents, the different types of marine organisms involved in patents, as well as an overview of the main European patent applicants/owners in general and by type of Blue Biotechnology sub-sector. The Search string was constructed using the following parameters: PN: AY: AD: patent number application year application ICM: main class of international classification TI_DE: title in German TI_EN: title in English TI_FR: title in French TI_XX: possibly in Spanish AC: CTZ: IN: application country amount of citations PRC: priority country PA: patent applicant inventor Definition and premises Because European patents can be written in English, German, or French, the search was done in all 3 languages. Different synonyms and alternative spellings of one term and its translations to German and French (including Latin names of the organisms: Phylum, Phyta, Class, Order or Family, if suitable) are provided in Wikipedia and used in the search string; 136 Generation of first dataset comprises the search approach covering all defined marine organisms 137 Basic evaluation of the dataset “patents assorted by used marine organisms” including checks of the results for false positive results i.e. hits resulting from the used search string but that do not belong to the Blue biotechnology topic. One example are patents describing inventions using sea salts and squid ink for the preparation of food (e.g. noodles) which arise when searching for squids and food. Also, Seashore renaturation methods occur frequently. With some small strings such as “li” in pa, in, prc false positives occur: in a lot of Asiatic names; patents are hits, where neither the country, nor the inventor or applicant is from Europe, but the inventors have a name with “li” 98 Study in support of Impact Assessment work on Blue Biotechnology
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