Insights into Railway Innovation Through Patenting Trends

This report by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the European Union Agency for Railways (ERA) uses patenting data from the European Patent Office as an indicator of global trends in innovation, and studies the comparative strengths of the EU, China, Japan, the US and South Korea since the year 2000.

Particularly, by investigating patent statistics from different perspectives, the report addresses the following questions:

• How did the patenting of railway inventions in the EU evolve since 2000?
• How does the EU rail sector perform in terms of patenting inventions versus other regions?
• What are potential areas of growth for the EU rail sector?
• To what extent can changes in patenting activity be attributed to competition, research projects and harmonisation efforts?