Academic Research Programme

High-quality research on patent-related topics is crucial to supporting informed policymaking and sound business decisions, as well as revealing the pivotal role that patents play in advancing innovation and economic growth. Our Academic Research Programme, first launched in 2017, is designed to encourage more research in the field and promote the dissemination of research results.

Collaborative research that makes a difference

Academic research can make a real difference to the advancement of policy, innovation and economic growth in Europe and beyond. Industries making intensive use of intellectual property rights (IPRs) generated almost a third of all jobs in the European in the period 2021-2023. Sectors using IPRs such as patents, trademarks or designs directly employed more than 65 million people in the EU during that period.

The results of academic research support informed policymaking. Patent legislation must balance the incentive to create and protect inventions with the goal of ensuring public access to knowledge. Empirical and theoretical research helps to assess how this balance can be achieved effectively and fairly to the benefit of inventors, patent applicants and the public alike.

Further, by analysing how patents influence investment in R&D and the diffusion of technology, academic research can identify trends and conditions that foster sustainable innovation and economic development.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is key. Academic research fosters dialogue among different disciplines, leading to new perspectives, innovative approaches and practical solutions. Research questions in the patent world span law, economics, management, engineering, and data science, among others.

The EPO’s Academic Research Programme is designed for researchers who want to contribute to this exciting process. After eight years and five previous calls for proposals, the programme has funded more than twenty research projects on a variety of patent-related matters, ranging from the scaling of digital data and training solutions to technical standards and knowledge transfer.

Selection process and current research streams

Following a recent call for proposals, a scientific committee chaired by the EPO’s chief economist and supported by independent external experts assessed 24 submissions based on five key criteria: originality, quality, potential impact, strength of the research team and multi-disciplinarity.

They selected six research projects to receive ARP funding, falling into two core areas:

Research stream A: Advanced methods for forecasting patent applications

Data-driven insights into the direction of innovation can help us understand and steer where technology is heading next. This stream invites research teams to develop methods for forecasting patent filings across patent jurisdictions, industries and technology fields.

Research stream B: Local ecosystems of academic inventors and universities

As technological change accelerates at an unprecedented pace, Europe’s competitiveness depends on knowing what’s being developed where, by whom and with what potential impact. This stream invites proposals for research on academic inventors and universities as important actors in innovation systems across Europe, their performance, and related challenges such as access to finance and barriers to commercialisation. To this end, the EPO invites academic teams to build on its earlier study on the role of European universities in patenting and innovation (2024).

An overview of the supported research projects is available under Current research projects.

Using the EPO tools TIP and PATSTAT

To carry out their research project, researchers will use two powerful tools provided by the EPO.

The Technology Intelligence Platform (TIP) is the EPO’s next-generation platform for processing, analysing and visualising patent data. The platform empowers researchers, businesses and anyone with an interest in data and innovation to run advanced patent data analysis using the EPO’s PATSTAT databases and numerous other high-quality data sets. TIP is free to use and also provides free access to PATSTAT.

PATSTAT contains a wealth of bibliographical and legal event patent data from more than 100 patent offices worldwide. PATSTAT has been compiled by the EPO over the last 20 years and is today a leading, world-class source for patent intelligence and statistics. PATSTAT users include leading International Organisations, patent information centres (PATLIBs) throughout Europe and national patent offices worldwide.

Timeline for ARP 2026-2028