Technological Competitiveness Report: Taiwanese patents for electrical machinery and electrical energy have high impact

Patent performance of Taiwan shows a clue that Taiwan has been absorbed in seeking and creating technological innovation and value. As indicated in a technological competitiveness report published by the Science and Technology Policy Research and Information Center (STPI) of Taiwan’s National Applied Research Laboratories (NARLabs), the number of Taiwanese patents granted in the United States has been increasing annually.  According to the statistics provided by the USPTO (the United States Patent and Trademark Office), Taiwan-received US patents cumulatively accounted for 3.62% of all countries during the period from 2009 through 2013, ranking 5th globally in the number of patents acquired in the U.S., behind the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Germany, and Taiwan. 

According to the STPI, the more frequently a patent is cited, the more impact the patent has, and a patent is considered high-impact when the number of its citations is among the top 10% of the total number of citations.  Taiwan came in 12th for the proportion of Taiwanese high-impact patents in the world, and this proportion bas gradually increased in recent years.  Moreover, Taiwan’s Technology Influence Index (TII) has risen from 0.51 to 0.60, which indicates that the quality of patents has increased each year.

The report shows that Taiwan’s homegrown patents mostly come from the areas of electrical machinery, engineering and electrical energy, semiconductor, audio-visual technology, optics, basic electronic circuit.  It is also noticeable that Taiwan has invested more in patent technologies of electrical machinery, engineering and electrical energy, and machine tools, among which the number of patents for machine tools is not remarkably high but these patents have more impact than other patents. 

In consideration of the technical fields relating to the Industry 4.0, the STPI conducted text mining and found that “data processing” and “information equipment” are the two most important technologies for the Industry 4.0, and Taiwan finished 6th globally in terms of number of acquired patents in the two areas, after the U.S. Japan, Germany, Korea, and Canada, seeing its gradual rise year by year. 

According to the STPI, Thomson Reuters’ database analysis showed that innovation growth rate declined 3% globally from 2013 through 2014, and Taiwan experienced the same in innovation growth rate.  From 2010 through 2013, Taiwan had presented its strong performance in innovation, which can be substantiated by the number of patent applications filed during that period, but the same brilliant performance did not continue in 2014.  In recent years, technological growth around the world has mostly come from consumer products and life science.  For sustaining innovation in high-tech area and confronting the circumstances of aging population and shrinking labor force, Taiwan extremely needs to develop automated production process and promote the fourth industrial revolution.  (October 2015)
/CCS