To be very clear: This especially means that the lithium-ion battery category does not contain any patent families tagged as solid-state battery inventions. The fourth step’s purpose was to add patent data related to redox-flow and nickel–hydrogen batteries to the dataset.
We find that several battery-related technologies and applications, such as energy storage systems, battery management systems, wireless power transmission, electric vehicle charging, and uncrewed aerial vehicles (i.e., drones), grew in relevance both in absolute terms and relative to general battery patenting activity.
Overall, a considerable increase in annual battery patenting activity is observed from 2000–2009 to 2010–2019. Second, we also found that four battery technologies – redox-flow, solid-state, sodium-ion, and lithium–sulfur batteries – have displayed vibrant growth in recent years.
We find that global battery patenting activity grew significantly in the 2000–2019 period. This stylized fact means that the comparative advantages of secondary approaches (rechargeable, redeployable, reusable batteries) have been continuously on the rise driven by innovation, making a direct contribution to socio-technical circularity.
Given the IPF constraint deployed for this study and the IEA and EPO report , these solely nationally filed applications are not considered in either one. In fact, in the current study’s dataset, IPFs make up only 19.4% of all battery patent families.
The majority of battery patents are found to originate in Asia while high battery patent intensities are revealed in the performance of several Asian and European countries. Overall, a considerable increase in annual battery patenting activity is observed from 2000–2009 to 2010–2019.