Joint Report by the European Patent Office and the the European Investment Bank on Fourth Industrial Revolution Technologies
Jane Lambert On 28 April 2022, the European Patent Office and the European Investment Office published a joint report entitled Deep tech innovation in smart connected technologies A comparative analysis of SMEs in Europe and the United States April 2022 . Although the report contained a lot of positive findings, the headline of the EPO's news item was decidedly gloomy: "Despite impressive patent activity, Europe’s small deep tech businesses lag behind their US counterparts." Part of the reason for the gloom is that report focused on the EU rather than Europe as a whole. Consequently, it missed the fact that the UK has almost 1,000 small and medium-sized enterprises developing 4IR technologies (nearly twice as many as Germany with 570 and nearly two and a half times as many as France with 400) and that London hosts one of the top clusters of such businesses (see page 30 and the map on page 29 of the main report). It would have been interesting to know the reasons for t...