Significant Aquaculture Innovation
Congratulations to Cleanseas Tuna Ltd and Japan’s Kinki University for agreeing to exchange technologies and techniques in the area of Bluefin Tuna propagation. A great illustration of open innovation.
This may be a significant step in commercialising the closure of the Tuna lifecycle which will potentially reduce the depletion of wild Tuna stocks.
There are many discussions on Finfish.org about finfish aquaculture developments and innovations in Australia, EU and the United States but what about Japan?
Japan has one of the highest global per capita levels of fish consumption and therefore it is not surprising that it is the target market of many finfish aquaculture producers. However Japan’s capabilities in terms of capital investments, research and development, as well as automation is possibly ranked amongst the top few in the world.
It is crucial to understand where the market is. However it is also crucial understand the development of aquaculture in that market as it is aiming to improve its self sufficiency in (sea)food supplies. See the link below.
http://www.unitar.org/hiroshima/programmes/shs06/materials/Ohashi_State_of_Fisheries.pdf
Patenting in the field of aquaculture has increased markedly over the last few years with at least a trebling of the number of patents registered between the early 1990s and the mid naughties.
We searched using the key words ‘aquaculture’ and ‘fish farm’ to identify relevant documents from a number of data sets including US, Japan, Germany, EU and the World Intelllectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and INPADOC. The search produced just over three and a half thousand patent documents out of a total data set of over 50 million.
This bar chart shows the scale of the uplift in patenting activity we have witnessed within this data set.
We will analyse aquaculture patenting activity in greater depth in a series of forthcoming posts, so if this is of interest please stay tuned.
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The data generated here is supplied by Thomson Scientific using their patent data analytics suite. In this instance the Delphion product was used to generate the data.
I conducted a search to identify the organisations most active in seeking patent protection for aquaculture innovations.
My preliminary search used the key words ‘aquaculture’ and ‘fish farm’ to identify relevant documents from a number of data sets including US, Japan, Germany, EU and the World Intelllectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and INPADOC.
The search produced just over three and a half thousand patent documents out of a total data set of over 50 million.
The organisations with the most active patent portfolios are as follows:
NUTRECO AQUACULTURE RESEARCH 77
NORWEGIAN INSTITUTE OF FISHERIES AND AQUACULTURE 30
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND BIOTECHNOLOGY INSTITUTE 24
MARTEK BIOSCIENCES CORPORATION 19
SEABAIT LIMITED 17
WYETH 16
NORSK HYDRO 14
OMEGATECH 14
VELCRO INDUSTRIES 14
AQUACULTURE CRC 13
HENKEL KOMMANDITGESELLSCHAFT AUF AKTIEN 13
ASCOM NEXION 12
FISHFARM TECH 12
DSM IP ASSETS 11
MARICAL 11
OMS INVESTMENTS 11
BOARD OF REGENTS, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS SYSTEM 10
The patent count that I have produced here is raw data on the number of patents across a number of jurisdictions. As such it represents a measure of the investment that organisations are dedicating to intellectual property protection rather than a count of the number of individual inventions.
The data generated here is supplied by Thomson Scientific using their patent data analytics suite. In this instance the Delphion product was used to generate the data.
