India climbing up the ladder of emerging tech patents, shows data

The IP regime is exploding with patent applications. Domestic and global companies in emerging technologies have filed over 80,000 applications in India between 2016 and 2020 in areas ranging from Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and big data to cloud, Edge, cyber security, and real time processing.   They account for 70 per cent of all technology patents.

According to data from global IP research and consultancy firm Sagacious IP, 5,000 patents were filed in AI in India in the decade 2011-2020. But of these, 86 per cent were filed in the last five years.

Sagacious IP says that innovation in AI has gained significant traction over the last decade. India is now ranked 8th in terms of AI patent filing and 4th in terms of AI research papers.

Consumer electronics, personal computing devices and healthcare are the key focus areas for patents in India in AI. And AI accounted for 6 per cent of all emerging technology patents filed in the last five years.

In vehicle infotainment, which is opening up as electric vehicles make a big entry, 78.85 per cent of the 300 patents between 2011-2020 were filed in India in the past five years.  This percentage share is the highest of any country: China (72.76 per cent); the US (70.61 per cent); South Korea (69.85 per cent); Taiwan (76.74 per cent).

Where India is behind is in the total number of vehicle infotainment patents. China filed 2,850 patents in the last five years. The US filed 1,564. India filed only 238 between 2016-20 but this was better than Taiwan’s 165.

Explaining the huge push in filing patents, Abhinav Mahajan, head, ICT and licencing at Sagacious IP, said Indian and global companies were patenting their technologies to have a competitive edge here.

“The reason is that they now see India as an important market at par with the US and China. Also, with India increasingly becoming a key centre for R&D in areas like AI, IoT, and electric vehicle technology, more patents will be filed in India in the coming years,” said Mahajan.   

In the IoT space, over 5,300 patent families were filed in India in the last decade. But here too, 87 per cent of these 5,300 were filed only in 2016-2020.  As much as  40 per cent of the patents filed in IoT in India originated in the US, followed by India with 33 per cent. Within IoT, the health-care domain came top followed by automobiles.

In the emerging ultra-wideband technology which is being introduced in many mobile phones such as Apple and Xiaomi, as many as 124 patents were filed between 2017-2021 in India and these included top players like chip design company Qualcomm, Xiaomi, Apple, and Alibaba among others. Ultra-wideband technology is a short-range wireless communication protocol similar to Bluetooth but more precise, reliable, and effective.  

According to Sagacious IP data, Qualcomm has filed almost as many patents for this technology in India as in China, the US and Korea while Xiaomi, which has the most patents, also follows the same trend except in China where it has  many more patents.