EPO Annual Review 2022 highlights

The European Patent Office (EPO) published its Annual Review 2022 today, complemented by a video featuring highlights from the past 18 months. Together, they tell a story of a commitment to provide innovators with the highest quality products and services, as the race for sustainable inventions intensifies.

The Annual Review 2022 is accompanied by detailed annex reports offering insights into key areas such as quality, environmental sustainability, international co-operation, social aspects, IT, data protection, communication and the European Patent Academy. In addition to providing key operational results, the publication of these reports reflects our commitment to transparency and good governance.

Commenting on this year's review, EPO President António Campinos said: “The European Patent Office is now more agile, adaptable and sustainable than ever before. Over the last year we have become a more collaborative organisation, capitalised on the benefits of an ongoing digital transformation, renewed our commitment to quality, and worked with our stakeholders to deliver the leading products and services they need. All while reinforcing our sustainability - environmental, social, corporate governance and financial. These are crucial achievements as we begin a new era in European patent protection with the Unitary Patent, supporting a true single market for technology and a more sustainable global patent system.”

The Annual Review 2022 presents the results of a year in which the EPO received a record 193 460 applications, an increase of 2.5% compared to 2021.^[1] As innovation remained strong despite ongoing challenges in many industry sectors and countries last year, our patent examiners carried out a total of 362 909 search, examination and opposition products in 2022.

Sustainable growth with global impact

The Office gained fresh momentum in the pursuit of its ultimate goal of securing long-term sustainability. With the release of state-of-the art tools and platforms, the EPO is empowering staff to provide the highest quality products and services to users. While our digital transformation journey has reached new milestones, increased dialogue with users is helping to ensure that our products and services continue to meet their rapidly changing needs. Together with our intense preparations for this month’s launch of the Unitary Patent system, these efforts have continued to meet with high levels of user satisfaction.

The European Patent Network continues to grow too, as well as foster further collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Access to patent knowledge also improved thanks to the launch of new interfaces, ranging from our clean energy technologies platform on Espacenet to our Knowledge Transfer to Africa initiative, which is fostering co-operation between our PATLIB network and African universities. Further, as the EPO continues to pursue carbon neutrality by 2030, we closed 2022 with a historically low level of emissions. This was achieved by energy saving measures in our buildings, as well as the increased use of videoconferencing, which as of 2023 is the new standard for all first instance oral proceedings.

The progress made in achieving our strategic goals has largely been possible thanks to the feedback, input and support of our stakeholders. As a result, we are well-positioned to make the launch of the Unitary Patent a success, and build further on the 50 years of the European Patent Convention that we will celebrate later this year.

^[1] For all the latest statistics and trends on European patent applications and granted patents, see our Patent Index 2022, published on 28 March 2023.