Patent indicators are now used by companies and by policy and government agencies alike to assess technological progress on the level of regions, countries, domains, and even specific entities such as companies, universities and individual inventors. However, with respect to the latter (i.e. analysis on the level of the patentee), specific concerns can be discerned.

These concerns stem from the heterogeneity of patentee names to be found in patent documents. The same organization or individual can appear in different guises when patentees apply for patents through different channels over extended time periods. While this poses no specific challenge to the functioning of the patent system itself – where patent documents are used on a recurrent basis to assess prior art – it complicates the analysis on the level of patentees. The analyst is confronted with inconsistencies such as spelling mistakes, typographical errors and name variants.

In this paper, we develop a comprehensive method to achieve harmonization of patentee names in an automated way. The method has been applied to an extensive set of all patentee names found for all EPO patent applications published between 1978 and 2004 and all granted USPTO patents published between 1991 and 2003.

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From the mid-1980s onwards, a broader conception of the dynamics underlying innovative performance, synthesized by the concept of the ‘innovation system’, has emerged. This concept sees innovative performance on the level of regions, nations or industries as driven by industrial innovative activity and the pursuit of scientific excellence, both of which are influenced and shaped by institutional frameworks. Moreover, interaction among different institutional actors is advanced as a further explanation for differences in technological and innovative performance. These interactions are seen as critical in the process of knowledge generation and diffusion on a national, regional and industrial level.

A corollary of this conception of innovation dynamics is the need for refinements in patent indicators. Sector assignment - i.e. identifying whether patentees are companies (private business enterprise), universities and higher education institutions, or governmental agencies - thus becomes a necessary condition for further analysis of the dynamics underlying technological performance. Within the framework of the PATSTAT Task Force on Harmonized Patent Statistics, efforts have been launched to produce an exhaustive sector assignment taxonomy. EUROSTAT has invited experts from K.U.Leuven to develop such a methodology. In this paper, the methodology that we have developed will be outlined and made fully transparent.

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This report focuses on an overview of regional patent activity in Belgium for the period 1990-2004/5. Nuts regional allocation was based on the address information available for patent applications and grants in the EPO and USPTO patent system.

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Following the efforts to regionalize patent data on the Flemish level, the current report provides an overview of technological activity, measured by patent indicators on the level of NUTS 2 regions, for all EU-27 countries.

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After a question from the steering committee of ECOOM the technometrics group organized a questionnaire to determine the commercial activity of the patent portfolio’s of the Flemish universities. It concerns the patents reported in the IOF key. For this questionnaire the patent that were granted in the EPO and USPTO systems were taken into account. The questionnaire is restricted to the time period 1998-2006 and only take into account patent where the university is (co-)applicant.

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