My friend Marc Laperouza, one of the world’s most interesting experts on Asia ICTs (blog, Lift08 talk), digged some interesting stats about the number of patents per country.

 

Link

The total number of Asian patents is stable (44.1% in 2000, 46.2 in 2006) but Korea and China are rising to compensate Japan’s slowing innovation. Europe is kind of worrisome, while the Swiss are keeping up with the big guys and living up to their reputation of one of the most innovative crowd there is on this planet. Africa is nowhere to be seen, maybe hiding in the “Others” category somewhere?

Of course these figures do not represent reality - many innovations never get patented - but they are an interesting indicator of the economical forces fighting for consumers money on the planet, and of where you should be looking at to find the next big social changes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 6:40 am and is filed under innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.