After the raid on Olympic gold medals, China is racing for another prize: the lead in patents!

A recent report from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) indicates that between 2005 and 2006 the number of filings worldwide by applicants from China increased by 32.1%. Chinese residents increased their share of total worldwide patent filings from 1.8% to 7.3% between 2000 and 2006 - mostly due to increases in domestic patent filings.

At the corporate level, the telecommunication equipment manufacturer Huawei has even moved up 9 places to become the 4th largest patent applicant with 1,365 applications published in 2007, following Matsushita, Philips Electronics N.V. and Siemens. While just missing the podium, it leads among all Chinese patent applicants for the sixth year in a row and now totals more than 29000 patents.

So, is the era of reverse-engineering and pirating over? For sure, there aren’t so many “Huawei” out there yet but at least it is an encouraging sign that Chinese companies now take pride in patenting.

According to a recent Gartner report, innovation is re-shaping China’s economy. And this time it is supposed to come from domestic firms.

There are the technology innovators like Yulong which developed mobile phones that work with both GSM and CDMA networks;  the business model innovators like Focus Media who invented selling ads via LCDs; and even the operation innovators, like China Mobile who are able to maintain a 50% margin with a voice tariff below 0.03 cents per minute.

For the time being innovation is still not radical. Most business models and products are copied from firms in developed economies but pioneering days may be getting closer. Government policy has maintained a strong emphasis on innovation policy over the past decade. All is needed now is a critical mass of private sector players…

Will widgets (software applications) allow the emergence of truly global mobile operators? Last week Vodafone and China Mobile (600 million subscribers together) joined with Softbank to launch the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL). Their focus is on improving mobile’s user interface, and in particular enable different widgets and applications to run smoothly on different handset platforms and operating systems across different mobile operators.

Behind JIL’s widgets project something more profound is taking place. Remember that the world’s two largest mobile phone operators entered into a strategic alliance in 2000 (sealed by Vodafone’s USD 2.5 billion acquisition of 2% of China Mobile). They have been collaborating on a number of projects over the years - more recently they jointly backed LTE, preparing the ground for 4G. At stake this time is no less than the development of a universal software specification.

So is this the signal that the two operators are finally coming out of the woods and prepared to use their huge subscriber base to drive the future of the mobile industry? For sure, cooperation will be useful to speed the roll-out of mobile internet services. It will also allow them to better face the upcoming battle with Google and Yahoo  - who are also keen to occupy the mobile space. It is also interesting for China Mobile - and China in general - since it will be one of the first attempt to approach standardization in a bottom-up fashion - from the market - rather than top-down - from the government. We may be witnessing China Mobile’s first steps into becoming a global mobile operator…

Please meet CCSA - China Communications Standards Association - one of the hyper-active Chinese governmental agency in charge of flooding the world of telecommunication with home-made standards. Not long ago it came up with an “earphone access” standard and an “interface data exchange” standard to regulate mobile phone data and transmission. Look out for green and yellow UDX labels (Universal Data Exchange)…

This time CCSA is shifting its focus from traditional telecom services to Internet-related convergent services. Together with major telecommunication operators, the agency is looking into providing convergent communication services through platforms and solutions offered by global suppliers like Cisco, Microsoft, Huawei or ZTE. The move indirectly acknowledges that some domestic companies have reached the technological capacity and maturity of leading international companies. Also, it doesn’t try the usual trick of competing heads on with existing standards - rather it attempts to bring together diverse technologies.

But don’t worry. CCSA has not completely given up on its more traditional business: it will soon issue a series of standards on energy efficiency and environmental protection for the telecom equipment manufacturing and telecom service industries.

Wasn’t the introduction of TD-SCDMA (the Chinese 3G standard) in 2008 supposed to mark China’s technological coming out? Not quite, at least that’s what two weeks of commercial trial seem to indicate.

Complaints about signal standards, restricted coverage and a general lack of content are comforting the eternal doubters of China’s capacity to successfully roll out its own third-generation (3G) service. There is even a kind of Schadenfreude among the watchers of the country’s technological efforts: “I told you so”, “TD-SCDMA was a disaster waiting to happen”…

For sure, TD-SCDMA’s agenda remained dictated by the government, rather than by consumers. The overall drive may also have lacked the necessary back-and-forth between the labs and the market to improve the technology and build on valuable consumer feedback. So, the withholding of 3G network licenses not only results in the non-deployment of more mature CDMA2000 or W-CDMA 3G networks in time for the Olympics. China also lost a chance to prove the openness of its markets and make good on its WTO committment to technological neutrality. Worse of all, the country may be sending techno-nationalistic signals without an ability to really deliver anything commercially viable behind.

Let’s hope that the failed launch of 3G can serve as an example for the deployment of 4G!

Earlier this year China’s National Copyright Administration (NCA) - yes there is such an agency - launched the first phase of the construction of a monitoring platform for the violation of intellectual property rights (IPR) on the Chinese Internet.

The platform is expected to have an automatic search system for music and film products that are being broadcasted online without permission. Once it has detected such products, it will send a notice to the relevant websites and ask them to delete them.

This is theoretically good news to holders of IPRs. China is famous for repeated infringments of IP in the “real world” (pirate DVDs, softwares and even iphones) so one could reasonably assume that it could spread to the web - the difference is that when it comes to the Internet, the Chinese government has been running a very tight operation. Problem is that the Chinese courts have been giving mixed signals about music infringments on the Internet with domestic ISPs and portals getting off lightly compared to foreign ones. Let’s hope that this time the dots are aligned.

China Mobile, Vodafone and Verizon - 700 millions subscribers or one third of the world’s mobile phone users - are getting together to run Long-Term Evolution (LTE) trials. They are expected to focus on  FDD to enable the exploitation of unpaired spectrum globally. In other words, they are working together on the next generation mobile technology (4G) to adopt a harmonised access platform with global scale.

The trial doesn’t really come as a surprise. Vodafone took a share in China Mobile a few years ago and both operators see themselves as global players - China Mobile still lags behind Vodafone on that count. Two things are really interesting: 1) the move comes from carriers and not, as one would expect, from equipment manufacturers, 2) the carriers are present in Asia, Europe and the United States, the most lucrative or fastest-growing markets.

So, is WiMax (a rival 4G standard) losing out? Not quite. It retains strong backing from Intel, Motorola, KDDI and Samsung. More importantly, WiMax is ready for deployment which gives it an 18 month lead on LTE. Will time-to-market dwarf critical mass?

For those of us who were thinking that only developing countries were entitled to technological leapfrogging, we may be in for a surprise with the development of the next-generation broadband wireless mobile communication network (aka 4G).

In the “old days”, telecommunication standards were set by Western multinational companies who would then roll out their products in their markets (mostly in the West). Developing countries would follow (or not) and from time to time leapfrog… This time, the International Telecommunication Union has been discussing the allocation of spectrum for 4G with China already considering three spectrum segments to be used for 4G.

Can we actually speak of a revolution? Rather an evolution. On one hand, China had already started working on the development of FuTURE (Future Technologies for Universal Radio Environment) as early as 2001. On the other hand, the development will most likely entail cooperative agreements involving international leaders in the field and Chinese companies: Datang Telecom said it has set up a 4G mobile technology research center in Beijing with Ericsson. Some analysts have even been arguing for some time that it makes sense to go directly to 4G on the grounds that there is no business case for 3G in China!

While China’s homegrown third generation (3G) wireless standard TD-SCDMA is starting to gain ground at home, its prospects might be overshadowed by the emergence of a new competitor.  

Key districts in Beijing, such as Olympic sites, Olympic-related accommodation and the city’s central business district, will be covered by a wireless broadband network by the end of 2007. The network will use a mix of Wi-Fi and WiMAX technologies. After covering an initial 40 square kilometers across a number of key districts, the project will cover the city’s university campuses and hi-tech districts. The aim is then to expand it to cover the entire city. And Beijing is only one in six cities in China which are developing wireless network projects. Guangzhou is to go wireless by 2010. For Shanghai, the idea is to combine WiMAX and Wi-Fi to offer a district-wide wireless broadband network.

The municipalities are seconded by Cisco’s vision to have mega-city networks supporting high-definition video transfer and connecting government-authorized networks in areas such as traffic control, security monitoring and environmental regulation.

Moving straight to “fourth-generation” broadband means telecoms companies could leapfrog the political infighting and technology debates that have hamstrung the rollout of 3G in China. China is on course to leapfrog not only technologies but also developed countries.