The PatVal-EU Project

PatVal-EU is a research project conducted between 2001-2003 by 6 research units in 6 countries (France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, UK).

It created a database from a survey of a sample of EPO patents with priority date 1993-1997

The questionnaire was sent to the first inventor listed in the patent (if not available: to any other inventor)

It asked information about the patent and the inventor not available from the patent document, or from other sources

We mailed 27,531 questionnaires and received 9,216 questionnaires covering 9017 patents

3,346 were invented in Germany, 1,486 in France, 1,542 in the UK, 1,250 in Italy, 1,124 in the Netherlands, and 269 in Spain

This reflectes the distribution of patents across these countries in the period considered

We conducted pilot tests

We controlled for sample biases

The Project was funded by the DG Science & Technology of the European Commission (Contract N. HPV2-CT-2001-00013)

We produced a collective paper signed by the 20 researchers involved in the project describing the methodology of the survey and summarizing the data.

See Giuri, P., Mariani, M. et al., 2007, “Inventors and Invention Processes in Europe. Results from the PatVal-EU Survey”, Research Policy, Vol. 36 (8), pp.1107-1127.

Even more details are in the Final PatVal-EU Report and its Annex I and Annex II