Analyzing patent filing trends provides key insights on technology and business competence across industries and sectors. They have the potential to effect important decisions relating to R&D and business strategies of firms, institutes or government organizations. As companies are increasingly pursuing patent protection of their innovations overseas their filing patterns follow the countries that they consider as important markets for their inventions.

Analysis of domestic patenting activity helps give a picture of the research and technological development being done in a country while an increase in foreign applicant filings in a particular domain can indicate the existence of a large market for the technology.

In this report we have analyzed worldwide patent filings across different patenting authorities. We have considered all published patent applications up to June 2015 in the report. For various charts and graphs, all filing data till mid-2013 can be considered as complete since recent filing data is usually not available for some countries and there is always a time lag ranging from 12-24 months until a patent application gets published.

We can see that the emerging economies are highly competitive in their own backyards and companies from them are increasingly filing globally. Further electrical engineering and computer technology are the most preferred areas for patent protection.

All search and analysis including all charts in this report have been generated using PatSeer without the use of any other external tools.