Analysis of patenting activities of FP7 NMP projects : final report

This study report presents the results from the analyses of patent activities from projects funded by the Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7) within the field of Nanosciences, Nanotechnologies, Materials and New Production Technologies (NMP). The aim of this study was to assess the innovative performance of FP7 NMP projects, highlighting the particularities of NMP and within its different areas. The study also assesses the appropriateness and quality of the underlying patent data, which were retrieved from the EC project reporting database SESAM. The quantitative analyses of patent data were complemented with surveys and interviews with FP7 NMP project coordinators. The main findings reveal that patents can be considered a relevant but incomplete indicator of the innovative output of FP7 NMP projects, due to the relevance of other IP forms like secrecy and defensive publishing. Moreover, in its current form, the SESAM database appears to be an incomplete and inaccurate source of information for monitoring patent output from FP7 projects. The study estimates that patents resulting from NMP projects are only covered in SESAM in the range of 15 % (worst case) to 56 % (best case). The report concludes with guidelines for adequate patent registration in SESAM and recommendations about the type of indicators and the adequate time horizon for monitoring project innovative outputs.