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 Because the endings of most terms can be flexible (e.g. plural, suffixes, causes), truncations are implemented;  Patent counting was structured around “patent families”. Each related patent application and granted patent was added to the family record as it is published. This being the case, all counts of records in this project refer to patent families or inventions, and not to individual patent documents. For example, the European application, European granted patent and the US granted patent for a single invention family is counted in aggregate as “1” in all the analyses in this report unless otherwise noted.;  A search for national patents was performed to reveal their amount and overall role in the Blue Biotechnology sector. From WO-registrations138 EU-patents might also be generated within 30 months. These patents probably were registered nationally before and it is important to consider them. National patents, where the patent is not written in English, French or German, will not have been found;  European patents from applicants or inventors of non-European countries were excluded;  It should be noted that not only Member States of the European Union were considered, but that European countries were considered by their geographical distribution, according to the 38 member states of the European Patent Organization from June 2012 (however without Turkey). This included the two extension states Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro, which have signed extension agreements;  Concerning aquaculture, we only counted patents applying use of biotechnology for improvement of aquacultures, hence, the International Patent Class IPC A01K61 (Culture of fish, mussels, crayfish, lobsters, sponges, pearls or the like IPC A01K80 (harvesting oysters, mussels, sponges) and A01K63 (receptacles for live fish, e.g. aquaria (keepnets or other containers for keeping captured fish)) were excluded. All other patents in IPC A01K (Animal husbandry; care of birds, fishes, insects; fishing; rearing or breeding animals, not otherwise provided for; new breeds of animals) were also excluded;  General keywords can be broken down to keywords with smaller domains. The keywords “pharmaceutical” or “drug” have the subgroups “antibiotic”, “anticancer”, “antiinfectiva”,… In the profiling all general and special keywords are taken together;  The definition of the distance between 2 keywords (especially between “marine” and the residual keywords) is the most crucial step in profiling: the nearer they are defined, the less false positives (patents that do not belong to Marine Biotechnology (MBT)), but also the less false negative (patents belonging to MBT, but are not detected) hits are shown. This step was defined with each keyword-set separately;  Priority country is typically the country where the invention was invented and therefore has been used as a proxy to determine levels of patenting output by a particular country. This measurement is used in the absence of an inventor country within the patent data, this particular field is not present across many authorities;  Where families have more than one assignee, the counts in the assignee tables contain a count for each assignee. However, within the country tables only one count is attributed for co-assigned inventions ensuring no double counting due to multiple assignees;  Patent Cooperation Treaties (PCT) filings are becoming more popular as they allow entities to delay decisions about large investments of patent maintenance fees. As entities target global markets they need to decide on the correct markets to protect their inventions. PCT filings offer a longer decision period before deciding how many countries they should go to national phase to obtain a granted patent. Results in numbers and specific screening of the results The amount of hits for the distinct keywords and their combinations gives a first hint of the European patenting of products and technologies in the field of Blue Biotechnology. The total sum 138 WO: A WO patent is granted by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Study in support of Impact Assessment work on Blue Biotechnology 99

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