Average = 1 patent application / 1 million Poles

It has been reported that Polish citizens submitted 40 European patent applications last year. Taking into account that our country has almost 40 millions of citizens we proudly reach level of 1 (one) patent application for 1.000.000 (one million) people. Funny, isn’t ? But I’m not joking …

Why it's so bad ? The entrepreneurs jointly say: the European patent system is too expensive for SME, especially from new EU members, and the procedure lasts too long. Thats true.

Maybe the proposal of improving European patent system announced by the European Commission will help our inventors, but I’m rather skeptical. Many of them don’t understand consultation paper – it’s available only in English and French. Responses also have to be in one of these languages so probably many voices remain unheard. Polish IT sector have already protested against that.

If you follow this link to Rzeczpospolita newspaper (non subscription needed) and click on the image at the left upper corner there are some statistics of patent activity in the PCT procedure, according to which Polish inventors applied for patents 79 times in year 2005 (comparing for example with 13.000 German applications) .