مشخصات ثبت اختراع در کانادا: برخی از اکتشافات در آمار ثبت اختراع

The aim of this paper is to present the patent profile of Canada and Canadian inventors. Different measures of patent statistics have been used to compare Canada's profile with that of other countries. Also, the patent intensity of technologies and industries has been presented. Comparing Canada's patent profile with that of other countries using different patent statistics suggests that Canadian companies do not utilize patents as much as their counterparts in other industrialized countries. This is despite the fact that IP protection in Canada is not an obstacle to innovation according to the surveys of Canadian innovative companies.

During the last three decades, the most common assets of companies have shifted from largely tangible assets to intangible and knowledge-based assets such as intellectual property (IP) rights, research and development (R&D), software, skills, organisational know-how and branding. Studies in several OECD countries show that firms now invest as much in intangible and intellectual assets related to innovation as they invest in traditional capital such as machinery, equipment and buildings [23]. Considering this new trend, providing consistent and comparable information on intellectual assets would help investors to better assess future earnings and the risks associated with different investment opportunities. This piece of information would also help policy makers in the design and use of different instruments to enhance the innovative capacity and economic growth of the country. The aim of this paper is to provide some statistics on the use and exploitation of patents in Canada and by Canadian inventors. These patent statistics will give a better picture of the Canadian patent profile from domestic and global perspectives. A patent is a government grant to the inventor(s) giving the right to exclude others from making, using or selling an invention. The argument for government intervention to provide patent rights is that without this protection, competitive market systems fail to provide enough incentives for the private sector to undertake sufficient research and development (R&D) to generate new ideas and technologies which are important sources of long-run economic growth. When the government grants a patent, it trades off short term exclusive (monopoly) rights to the use of an invention in return for an incentive to create the invention as well as the early publication of the invention instead of using secrecy to protect the invention [8]. Patents allow successful innovators to benefit from their innovative efforts and also to provide an incentive to future investors. More specifically, patents are granted for three purposes1[15]: • they are legal means of providing exclusive rents and market share to inventors and companies as compensation for their investment costs, • since they require public disclosure of the technical nature of the new invention, they increase the stock of public knowledge, and, • protecting patents can serve as a support for international technology transfer. The structure of this paper is as follows. The next section discusses the profile of Canadian patents. This includes both patent applications filed in Canada and the Canadian patent applications globally. Section 3 discusses the relationship between patent statistics and innovation, and ranks selected countries by using this measure. Section 4 presents the performance of public institutes – universities and governments – in terms of filing patent applications. Section 5 presents Canadian patents by field of technology and industry classes. Section 6 summarizes the findings.

A patent is a government grant to the inventor(s) giving the right to exclude others from making, using or selling an invention. The argument for government intervention to provide patent rights is that without this protection, competitive market systems fail to provide enough incentives for the private sector to undertake sufficient research and development (R&D) to generate the new ideas and technologies which are important sources of long-run economic growth. This paper provides some statistics on the use of patents in Canada and by Canadian inventors. These patent statistics give a better picture of the Canadian patent profile from domestic and global perspectives. Patent statistics show that about 83% of patent applications in Canada have foreign origins. As such, Canada is usually referred to as an office of second filing due to its high percentage of non-resident filings. The United States was the source of 43% of patent applications at CIPO and the destination of 50% of Canadian applications in 2010. Comparing Canada's patent profile with that of other countries using different patent statistics suggests that Canadian companies do not utilize patents as much as their counterparts in other countries. It will be interesting to investigate the reason for this under-utilization of the patent system considering that according to the 2009 Survey of Innovation and Business Strategy (SIBS), IP protection was one of the least reported obstacles to innovation by all enterprises [12]. However, one area of strength is the higher share of university patents in Canada compared to other countries.