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Rising Patent Filing in India – Is it a reflection of innovation focus?
Rising Patent Filing in India – Is it a reflection of innovation focus?

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A quick answer to this question is that Patent filing alone is not a true metric of innovation prowess and should always be looked at in totality with the grant numbers. However, for a country like India the rising patent filing numbers are reflective of a good start that the country is making on its innovation journey, which will gain maturity as both filers and stakeholders realise the importance of IP creation. Now to get a detailed take on why we conclude that patent filing alone is not a good matrix, lets first look at the filing numbers.

Rising Patent Filing in India

On the world IP day Nasscom released its 8th edition of the patent report “PATENT PULSE 2025: Decoding India's Ascent in the AI Patent Landscape”, which highlighted that India maintained its fifth position in global patent filing in 2023, for most of us who have read India ranks sixth, the report excludes European Patent Office (as it includes multiple countries).

Source: PATENT PULSE 2025: Decoding India's Ascent in the AI Patent Landscape

Educational institutions – The Key Driver

Now if we look at a more recent India Patent Office data – the trend is similar where the total filing increased to 92K in FY24 from 83K in FY23. When we look deeper into these numbers, we see majority of this growth is coming from educational institutions which accounted for >25% of all the patent filed in the country in FY24.

Source: PATENT PULSE 2025: Decoding India's Ascent in the AI Patent Landscape

However, IITs and NITs collectively account for a small share raising questions on filing as a key innovation metrics.

If we look at the top filers under educational institutions, we see a lot of new private universities in the list filing an extremely high number of patent applications than the IITs and NITs collectively.

Top filers academic institutes and universities - FY24

 

Source: Intellectual Property India Annual Report FY24

This huge mismatch in filing numbers between the IITs/NITs collectively and the new universities raises doubts on whether rising patent filing is a true mark of innovation?

One side of the story is that most educational institutions in India have increased their focus on patent filing in order to improve their National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) rankings which gives weightage to patent filed, granted as well as licensed. And increasing the number of filings is one the fastest way to get better rankings, whether the patent is worth filing, whether it gets a grant or not may not be the focus here.

Now, this theory seems to be getting support from another data point from the nasscom report which states that basis the top 15 filers of AI patents in India “The grant ratio for academia is only 1.1% while corporates have a high grant ratio of 44.1%, this indicates academia needs to focus more on the quality of patents being filed”.

This justifies why we need to look at patents filed as well as grants in totality when we want to look at the innovation index in totality.

However, some of the key industry leaders in the IP space stated the other side of the story which is - As colleges get more IP aware they will file more patents, and this is reflective of a maturing IP ecosystem in the country, as currently India only accounts for a very small share of the global patent filing.

Some of the key suggestions that will help academic institutions mature on their IP creation journey:

  • Incorporate incentives for filers in educational institutions, such as:
    • Consideration of patents filed and grants in promotion of faculty members.
    • Honorarium for inventors both faculty as well as students with mandatory royalties when licensed– a best practice followed in Europe.
  • Government funding support for filing in key markets like the US where patent filing is expensive.
  • Do not evaluate success only on numbers of publications or patents, but the impact these inventions are making on the ground – which qualifies an invention as innovation.
  • A lot of work is being done on increasing IP awareness the next step is now to focus on quality of patents being filed, which means creation of IP cells at college/university level which can guide students and faculty on whether the idea they want to file is worth patenting or not. This first-level filtering will help in reducing the pressure on the already stressed Patent office machinery and challenging the resources in the right direction.

The Road Ahead

So, rising patent filings in the country marks a start of an innovation journey, as the ecosystem matures both the filing as well as the grant numbers should start increasing. India is slowly moving in that direction, but it has a huge ground to cover compared to the leading global counterparts like US and China.

 

 

 


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Neha Jain
Senior Analyst

Neha Jain

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