"As more patent applications are filed, the quality of each new patent increases"??

On May 19, 2014, the blog Intellectual Profit began with the text


Monday, May 19, 2014

Graphene - lessons for British innovation

Today's Financial Times has an article with the headline "Asia ahead in race to develop graphene". This is a technology that the British Chancellor of the Exchequer described as a "great British discovery". However, the UK has only filed 101 of the 11,372 patents and patent applications filed worldwide in the field of graphene - a mere 0.9% of the total.



One notes that the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics went to two Russians, Geim and Novoselev , "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene." From a Nobel Prize press release : Both of them originally studied and began their careers as physicists in Russia. Now they are both professors at the University of Manchester.



The blog post also had some interesting comments on "quantity" of applications:


Despite the inevitable protestations of "quality versus quantity", experience curve effects mean that as more patent applications are filed, the quality of each new patent increases.