One of the key facts emerging about the practice of open innovation is that the vast majority of significant innovation advances derive from applying insights already known in one field application to a field of application where the insight has not previously been used.

To test this insight I decided to investigate a hot field of inventive activity unrelated to fishing or aquaculture. According to an October 2008 report from the Office of Industries of the US International Trade Commission industrial biotechnology is an emerging field of biotechnology characterized by the use of enzymes, microorganisms, and other biocatalysts to create new products.

The report: may be accessed here Patenting Trends and Innovation in Industrial Biotechnology.  

To test the notion stated at the commencement of the post I reviewed the patent portfolios of some of the most active patenting companies to determine their relevance to aquaculture.

Novozymes is a producer of enzymes and micro-organisms for pharmaceutical and industrial uses. The company was founded in Denmark as a medical firm in 1925 and began producing enzymes for industrial use (for the softening of leather) in 1941. Novozymes has production and research facilities in Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark, Sweden, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and research facilities in India. 

While the largest share of Novozymes’ revenue comes from detergent enzymes, in the last few years, sales of technical enzymes, such as those that convert starch to sugars for the production of ethanol, have grown at a faster pace and are now almost equal to the company’s sales of detergent enzymes.

In 2007, Novozymes had revenue of $1.54 billion, net income of $213 million, and about 4,700 employees. Novozymes’ strong revenue and net income growth over the period have enabled growing R&D expenditures, which increased from $138.0 million in 2001 to $202.6 million in 2007.

The strategy for the future growth of the company is to expand the market for enzymes by producing new products, and new applications for current products, through substantial R&D efforts.

The report is valuable because on page 4-6 Figure 4.3 it broadly outlines the scope of the Novozymes patent portfolio as consisting of:

“an estimated 334 patents, and has pending an estimated 447 patent applications with the USPTO for the 1997–2007 period” 

Given this, we can assume that Novozymes has gained a thorough appreciation of the business of innovation and the role of intellectual property protection.

To test the notion that Novozymes might have IP valuable in aquaculture I determined to use the superficial approach of seeing whether the term ‘aquaculture’ was used in any of their patents.  I used the free patent search feature at Free Patents Online. Many other more sophisticated patent analytics tools exist to enable such investigations.

First I decided to investigate how many patents and patent applications were linked to Novozymes as an Assignee – 937 for US granted patents and applications.

I then searched for the word ‘aquaculture’ in all patent documents where Novozymes were identified as the assignee using the search string:  AN/novozymes AND ABST/aquaculture to determine how many Novozymes patents anticipate application in the field of aquaculture. 

The result is available here. Novozymes has identified bacteria which are more effective at removing ammonia and nitrite than the commonly used bacteria. Novoezymes present their product information here.

It would be interesting to judge the performance of this consortium of nitrifying bacteria on some inert media for removal of nitrates and ammonia for RAS systems.