European Patent Office Applicant Panel Survey 2004 Report has been published.
The European Patent Office Applicant Panel Survey 2004 Report is now available. The main document gives the results of a survey carried out by the EPO on a sample of applicants in 2004. The purpose of the survey was to find out intentions towards future numbers of patent filings. The results have been used to forecast overall likely numbers of filings for 2005 and 2006.
(Source: EPO)
"[...] Each year the EPO carries out a survey of filing intentions by applicants for European patents. In summer 2004 the latest survey was carried out by Roland Berger Market Research acting as researcher and consultant, using a questionnaire sent by fax and follow-up interviews. The survey design was similar to the one done in 2003 and has been executed and analysed by the consultant. The survey finds modest degrees of optimism among applicants regarding future numbers of patent filings in years 2004 to 2006. But it should be appreciated that the results of the survey are liable to large degrees of statistical error, summarised often by fairly wide 95% confidence intervals on the forecasts.
For us, the main purpose of the survey is to provide information on likely filing developments into the EPO's annual forecasting exercises for budgetary planning purposes. This effort is made in January each year, with the current objective being to forecast annual patent filings out as far as 2010. The survey is executed some months before January, so that the results become available in time for the planning exercise.
In this report there is a description of the survey set-up and execution, followed by a discussion of results. After presenting some descriptive statistics, the report concentrates on estimating future inputs for the main workload items at the EPO: Direct European route filings, Euro-PCT international phase filings and Euro-PCT regional phase filings. Then there is a discussion of filing trends for applications in other world patent systems (France, Germany, Japan, UK, USA). This is followed by information on R&D expenditures, inventions and first patent filings for each of the 14 main technology joint clusters that exist at EPO. Finally some statistics are presented that discuss survey items on time lengths between initial R&D expenditures and patenting, usage of the epolineŽ electronic filings system and patent licensing activities. [...]"
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Dipl.-Phys. Axel H Horns is Patentanwalt (German Patent Attorney),
European Patent Attorney as well as European Trade Mark Attorney. In particular, he is Member of:
European Patent Office Applicant Panel Survey 2004 Report is now available. The main document gives the results of a survey carried out by the EPO on a sample of applicants in 2004. The purpose of the survey was to find out intentions towards future numbers of patent filings. The results have been used to forecast overall likely numbers of filings for 2005 and 2006.
