China tops patent application list again but still waits for breakthrough

For the fifth year in a row, China has topped the world’s patent application list but failed to make any major breakthroughs, a Chinese official said today.
More than 60% of the applications in China were filed by enterprises engaged in high-speed train, nuclear power, 4G mobile telecommunications technology and ultra-high-voltage electricity transmission, said Wang Zhongyu, head of the China Enterprise Confederation, whilst bemoaning the lack of either top-level talent or  key technological breakthroughs and calling on companies to implement an innovation-driven development strategy to promote industrial transformation and upgrading.
His call comes two months after Reuters reported that  China’s State Council announced that it was to  give greater financial rewards to innovative academics and small research bodies in a drive to convert interesting scientific ideas into commercial realities and rev up its high-tech industries as wider economic growth stalls. Research bodies and university units who transferred their work to outside firms to develop and market should receive no less than half of the net income earned from the product as a reward, it ruled.
“It is important to speed up the transfer of scientific achievements, open a channel between science and the economy and quickly create a new productive force,” the State Council said in a statement late on Wednesday.According to statistics released recently by the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO), a total of 1,124,000 patent applications were received  during the first half of 2015, representing a year-on-year growth of 20.5%. 424,000 of the applications were for invention patents (up 20.9%), 471,000 for utility model patents (up 28.5%), and 229,000 for design patents (up 6.4%).