New products and innovative technologies usually ensure good business and increasing sales.

According to a joint study by the European Patent Office and the Office of the European Union for Intellectual Property, German companies are in many respects leaders in Europe when it comes to using intellectual property rights.

It examines the importance of intellectual property rights, such as patents, trademarks, designs and copyrights, for the EU economy between 2017 and 2019.

Ilka Kopplin

Business correspondent in Munich.

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To do this, the experts compared the patent data on companies in a wide variety of sectors with various data from the European statistical office in terms of economic performance, employment and other factors, explains Yann Manière, chief economist at the European Patent Office, in an interview with the FAZ

Strong contribution to economic performance

One result: Sectors with a higher need for intellectual property rights make an above-average contribution to gross domestic product and employment in Germany compared to the rest of Europe.

More than 48 percent of the economic output and more than a third of the total employment is accounted for by the so-called intellectual property-intensive sectors in Germany.

In Europe, these values ​​are slightly lower on average at around 47 percent.

Manière attributes this to the fact that Germany has a high proportion of manufacturing industry, which has a particularly large number of patents, such as in the automotive industry and mechanical engineering.

Germany is therefore more productive and efficient, said the economist.

The sectors that produce a lot of patents also pay better.

The evaluation for Europe shows that in these sectors of the economy, the additional earnings are on average 41 percent higher than in other industrial sectors.

The average weekly wage in the sectors is therefore 840 euros compared to 597 euros.

According to the study, IP-intensive industries directly employed more than 61 million people in the European Union and generated 6.4 trillion euros.

Conversely, this means: “More than half of European GDP is generated by non-patent-intensive companies, especially in the service sector, for example in the areas of logistics, agriculture or health care.

But while the textile industry itself is also not very patent-intensive, the companies indirectly use many patents, for example about machines and materials,” explains Manière.

Above all, innovations for climate protection technologies have increased.

In this area, German companies are also leaders with almost 42 percent of all patent applications within the EU.

“The economic contribution of green patents, i.e. patents for sustainable technologies, has grown over the years.

Interestingly, it is not only wind turbine manufacturers and similar companies that submit green patents, but above all those that need to become more energy-efficient and resource-saving, such as the automotive industry," explains Manière.

Meanwhile, the expert does not see that the energy crisis and a potential recession will lead to a slump in terms of innovations and patents.

“In the past, rising energy prices have fueled innovation because green technologies are more profitable then when energy is cheap.

I therefore expect that this crisis will also drive innovation in the field of clean energy even more strongly.”

Accordingly, patent applications for climate protection technologies reached a record in Europe in 2019.

In Germany, sectors that applied for patents on climate protection technologies accounted for almost 13 percent of all jobs and almost a fifth of economic output.