The University of Minho is the national institution with the most requests for “patent families”, according to the “Barómetro Inventa 2023 – Patentes Made in Portugal”.

The university’s 69 registrations include medical, biotechnological, autonomous driving, manufacturing, production and construction innovations, among others. The results reinforce the role of UMinho and the School of Engineering as one of the country’s drivers of innovation and its connection to the economic and social fabric.

In this annual ranking drawn up by the Inventa International consultancy, Bosch Portugal follows (55 patents), which in the last decade has had intense joint R&D activity with UMinho. The top 5 list also includes the universities of Porto (25), Aveiro (25) and Lisbon (23).

The Inventa Barometer aggregates registrations filed with the National Institute of Industrial Property, the European Patent Office, the World Intellectual Property Organisation, the US Patent and Trademark Office, the Chinese Patent Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and the Brazilian INPI. In this fourth edition, the ranking adopts a methodology based on applications filed (and no longer on published applications), since a patent application remains confidential for 18 months, so 2021 is the most recent year for public consultation in this area.

This document also reveals that the majority of patent applications were filed by higher education institutions and in the North, Centre and Lisbon regions. As for Portugal, despite its remarkable recent development, it is underperforming in absolute terms (18,353 patents from 2010 to 2021) when compared, for example, with France, the Netherlands or Spain, which had 45, 23 and 7 times more patent applications in that period respectively.

+Info: inventa.com/en/noticias/artigo/924/barometro-inventa-2023-patentes-made-in-portugal