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7.3.1Methodology for geographic assignment
Flanders has a long history of reporting of patent-statistics in the Flemish indicator book. In the Indicator Book, a patent is labelled as ‘Flemish’ if the address of the applicant and/or the investor is in Flanders. The patent indicator selected by VARIO in advisory report 13 also refers to this methodology.
This methodology is rather favourable for small, open economies with a high number of foreign investments. Distinguishing between Flemish applicants and Flemish inventors provide some additional insights:: Some 29% of "Flemish patents" have only a Flemish inventor (2019 figures). Over the past 10 years, that share has decreased by about 15 percentage points. Some 55% have both a Flemish applicant and Flemish inventor. In turn, this share increased by about 15 percentage points. 17% have only a Flemish applicant but no Flemish inventor (analyses performed by ECOOM, see Figure 2). Thus, adjusting the methodology to using only Flemish applicants would exclude the 29% share of patents with only Flemish inventor. This methodological difference may partly explain the trend differences between the figures in the Flemish Indicator Book and other reports.
Figure 2: Evolution of the Flemish EPO-patent applications, and the breakdown by inventor and applicant.
