Invent!

Whoever is going to govern our country will need to do much more than what has ever been done before for valuing creativity and innovation. Italy possesses a great technologic patrimony that, especially concerning small and medium-sized companies, is not exploited as much as it could or would deserve. The data published by the European Patents Office is clear: while the number of filed patents is generally increasing, Italy sees a drastic drop. Despite the economic crisis, there is generally more investment in inventions and, indeed, the number of applications in Europe in 2012 increased by the 6% on the previous year. Who holds the record, however, are the non-European states. The United States leads the charts with the 24.7% of filed applications, then Japan at 19.9%, Germany at 13.4%, China at 7.3% and Korea at 5.5%. Among these, China had a 11.3% increase of applications in Europe and Korea a 7.7% increase. These are important numbers that allow us to see how much the European market is interesting for foreign companies that are willing to invest in order to defend their technology. Among the European countries, only Germany confirms its own strength by taking the third place with a 3.4% increase in applications, followed by France at the sixth, Great Britain at the eighth, Netherlands at the ninth and Italy at the tenth. Unfortunately, among the top ten states Italy is the only one that has seen a drastic drop of applications (-4%) despite the recent supporting approach for innovation that clearly has not been sufficient.