Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020

3. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
175
academic performers in patenting AI as well as 10 of 
the top 20 for AI-related academic publications.
WIPO’s analyses
178
have shown that, although the 
Austrian Patent Office occupies 15th place in the 
rankings of the world’s most relevant patent offices 
in terms of AI, the overall statistics are dominated by 
other countries and patent offices, namely the Unit-
ed States Patent and Trademark Office, the State In-
tellectual Property Office (China), the Japan Patent 
Office, WIPO itself and the European Patent Office.
Based on WIPO’s methodology, recent analyses by 
the Austrian Patent Office presented in Fig. 3-5 show 
first of all that the total number of AI-related innova-
tions for which a patent has been applied has grown 
sharply, particularly since 2012. Fig. 3-6 illustrates 
this in more detail using the AI patent family (a col-
lection of all patent applications
179
derived from a 
single original application).
With the countries varying in size, the only rea-
178 See World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) (2019).
179 If, for instance, a patent is filed for an invention in Austria, further applications can also be made at a later date (usually within a 
year) e.g. in the USA and South Korea. This makes a total of three patent applications, all describing the same invention, which 
together form a patent family. The terms “invention” and “patent family” are thus largely synonymous.
sonable way to compare their AI-related patent ap-
plications is by using normalised values, particularly 
population (see Fig. 3-6). These analyses, which 
cover the USA and South Korea as well as the EU-
28, put Austria in 11th place for the last available 
year (2017), closely behind the UK and France. 
South Korea is the runaway leader, however, filing 
nearly 13 times as many patents per million inhabi-
tants as Austria. Even countries in the comparison 
that are of direct relevance such as Sweden, Fin-
land, Germany and the Netherlands are registering 
between 2.5 times (Netherlands) and 4.6 times 
(Sweden) as many patents.
The underlying trends vary between the countries 
analysed (see Fig. 3-7). Taking the number of inven-
tions in 2000 as the basis, the number of patented 
inventions – normalised by population – has, for ex-
ample, grown by a factor of 12 in Denmark and in-
creased nearly six fold in Finland. Austria is in a