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Table 3.14 Overview of marine biotechnology policy landscape in European countries81 Countries with a dedicated plan, programme or strong policy focus on marine biotech Considerable interest and/or activities in marine biotechnology R&D*  Ireland  Denmark  Norway  Belgium***  France  Germany***   Poland  Portugal  Italy**  Spain  Sweden  UK The Netherlands Some interest and activities in marine biotechnology R&D*  Croatia    Countries where marine biotech is supported via more wide-scope programmes and/or instruments Only limited marine biotech focus and activities* Greece Finland** Iceland  Romania  Slovenia  Turkey  Austria**  Bulgaria  Estonia**   Latvia** Lithuania**  Malta**  Switzerland**  Ukraine** * Based on the information that could be collected within the scope of the CSA MarineBiotech; ** Countries for which no or only limited information could be collected within the scope of the CSA MarineBiotech; *** Countries with a federal structure with considerable activities in one or more specific coastal regions. 3.3 Review of patent profiling A patent profiling sub-study was undertaken as part of the study to provide an overview of pending and approved patents related to Blue Biotechnology in Europe. The setup and validation of the methodology has been completed and is presented in Annex 5 together with the detailed results of the evaluation. Patents and scientific publications are a measurement of output performance and can be used to assess the relative strengths of a country, region or entity with respect to this specific form of intellectual property protection. However, the analysis of the patent situation does not necessarily reflect the economic power of a given sector, as various other strategies for valorisation exist. Especially in the field of SMEs, patenting is often avoided due to high costs and efforts. This does, however, not necessarily indicate a lack of commercialisation, but a different method, which requires further study. In terms of showing the relationship and knowledge transfer between academia into larger industry not only the absolute amount of patents filed is interesting, but also the comparison of patent filing versus number of scientific publications. 3.3.1 Positioning of Blue Biotechnology sector vis-à-vis other sectors The number of patent publications has been exponentially increasing over the course of the last 50 years. There was a real hot spot of patenting between 2000 and 2010. A trend analysis undertaken for all sectors until 2020 indicates a stabilisation in the number of patents in most sectors with only cosmetics and energy expected to increase further by 10-20%. 81 Taken from the ‘Report on strategic analysis of marine biotechnology RTDI in Europe’, Marine Board-ESF, 2013: http://www.marinebiotech.eu/images/Public_reports/Marine%20Biotechnology%20RTDI%20in%20Europe.pdf 48 Study in support of Impact Assessment work on Blue Biotechnology

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