India emerges as hub for patent offshoring

India is no where close to countries like US, Japan and China, when it comes to filing patents. But it still does a significant bit in the IP space. A lot of it's happening through patent service outsourcing in India.

This means, a lot of background work for the numerous patents that are being filed by other countries, are being done out of India. Experts say, patent services outsourcing, the high value work of legal process outsourcing (LPO) has been a fairly new phenomenon here, hardly four to six years old. According to estimates last year, more than 1.8 million patent applications were filed worldwide.

And the filing costs for these was between $30 billion to $32 billion. But what's driving growth in the worldwide patent outsourcing market is: Increased offshoring of R&D activity, lack of manpower and the impact of the US Patent Reform Act of 2007. (Read more..)


Source : The Times of India