Analyzing Patent-Literature for Mapping and Evaluating Covid-19 Innovation

The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted several patent offices worldwide to provide companies and investigators with a large number of new web-based services to cope with logistical and financial problems related to patent proceedings and to foster research and access to information relevant for developing new, more appropriate products and technologies. As of spring 2021, it is still too early to have a complete view about if and how innovation stemming from this “new normal” situation has been captured and claimed in patent applications. Given the potential financial and strategic importance for some applicants to get a patent quickly granted, the examination and publication of patent applications claiming products and technologies related to Covid-19 may have been accelerated shortly after their filing, at least in some countries. The paper present the data that has been extracted from patent databases using a methodology described in a recent publication (Falciola L and Barbieri M, “Searching and Analyzing Patent-Relevant Information for Evaluating COVID-19 Innovation”; Falciola L and Barbieri M, “Searching and Analyzing Patent-Relevant Information for Evaluating COVID-19 Innovation”; posted on Jan. 26th, 2021; available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3771756) about the earliest patent literature explicitly mentioning the relevance of claimed subject matter for Covid-19 pandemic that has been published by major patent offices worldwide. This analysis has been performed in three main dimensions: the claimed technologies (in medical and other domains), the type of patent proceedings (as a regular patent application or utility models, already granted or not), and countries (having own medical, IP, and economic policies). The patent publication trends have also been studied by distinguishing between two periods (March 2020 - August 2020 and September 2020 - February 2021) to identify how the temporal evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic may have affected the patenting strategies for protecting innovation in an emergency, as some evidence would suggest.