Foreign firms drive tech patents surge in innovative India

Bangalore: As India becomes an important center of innovation, Indian and global technology firms are increasing efforts to spread the message of the need to protect and patent the intellectual property developed locally. The effort by multinationals such as TI, Cisco, and NXP Semiconductors of Eindhoven, the Netherlands, who fly down their expert to India to educate their employees here on the need to protect intellectual properties, seems to be paying off. These companies have started seeing a surge in patent applications, both local and U.S., being filed from their research units in the country.

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Livemint.com reports that the trend is partly driven by the more complex and critical R&D assignments being taken on by the Indian units and cash incentives offered to encourage employees to create IP.

"Writing a patent is not easy," says Biswadip Mitra, managing director of Texas Instruments India. "Many a time, people have ideas, but they don't know how to file it (as a patent). Our philosophy is simple. Just write and we have subject experts to help you out," Mitra adds.

TI has seen an increase in patents being filed from India in recent years, with around 70 applications for U.S. patents filed in 2007. The Bangalore unit has filed more than 500 applications from Indian in the U.S. since 1985, when it became the first multinational technology firm to set up a development center in the southern city. The company wouldn't disclose the number of patents filed in 2006.

TI's competitor NXP Semiconductors, a spin-off from Royal Philips Electronics NV of the Netherlands, also has seen a spurt in patent applications after it started encouraging innovation among its employees here, says Nagavolu Murty, director of technology management at NXP Semiconductors India. NXP has seen a fourfold rise in patent applications filed by its employees in India - to around 20 Indian and U.S. ones a year, up from about less than five, Murty adds.

"The awareness to protect intellectual property has definitely increased over the past three years," says Kalyan C. Kankanala, chief knowledge officer of Brain League, a Bangalore-based IP services firm that assists companies such as Sterlite Optical Technologies in filing patents.

Patent applications filed by firms in India grew annually by around 20 percent to 35,000 in 2007-08, according to the Indian Patent Office. Details of the number of U.S .patent applications being filed for work done locally were not available.