Valley company holds the top
A total of 2,231 inventions were registered with the Austrian Patent Office in 2022. The number one province continues to be Upper Austria – with 470 inventions. Second and third place go to Styria with 436 and Vienna with 345 inventions. The largest patent applicant at the Austrian Patent Office – unchallenged for years – is AVL List with 189 invention applications, followed by Julius Blum with 79 and Engel and Siemens with 26 invention applications each..
Technologies of the future are in demand
The Patent Office’s figures once again clearly show that Austrians are particularly active in researching and developing future technologies such as artificial intelligence, 3D printing and robotics. In their industrial application, the 4th industrial revolution, patent applications have more than tripled since 2010.
In some fields, which also include technologies for energy saving, data management and robotics, patent applications from Austria have even increased sixfold since 2010. Minister Leonore Gewessler commented: “So many patents in areas of Industry 4.0 make me confident. Above all, it shows that our funding strategies are bearing fruit. We owe this impressive increase in performance in a very short period of time to our industrial flagship programs Production of the Future, ICT of the Future, but also to the research work in the relevant COMET centers such as the Austrian Center for Digital Production, the Linz Center of Mechatronics or Pro2Future – Products and Production Systems of the Future.”
Start-ups secure their ideas
More than half (53 percent) of domestic patents are held by large companies – and the trend is rising. Among the new customers at the patent office, start-ups are doing best. According to Start-up-Monitor, around a quarter of Austrian start-ups have their own patents and almost 55 percent file trademark applications. Austrian spin-offs from universities or research institutions stand out in particular. Of them, as many as 50 percent have a patent. The number of patents held by newcomers or companies that rarely file patents declined during the crisis.
