There is no doubt that future success for nations lies in their capacity for Innovation. Leading and reputable consulting firms, such as Boston Consulting Group and the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) have been developing indices to measure innovation and its influence on the well-being of a country.
The eco-system of innovation includes Patents and R&D investments. Before mergers and acquisitions, large multinationals pay extra attention to patents awarded. Many high pay jobs are given to patent authors and co-others. Intellectual property provides an enormous competitive advantage and eliminates competing forces for 20 years. A greater cause-and-effect analysis of patents in Tunisia will be discussed in future publications. In this short note, we compiled the evolution of patents issued to Tunisia as reported in the World Bank database. A brief comparative analysis of national trends to other countries is highlighted in the chart below. The selected countries match our prior R&D spending per GDP publication. We chose to exclude South Korea (in the first chart only) as the great number of published patterns rendered the picture out of scale and unmanageable (they are doing that well).
By quick visual inspection, none of the Arab or North African countries under study is awarded enough patents to be able to compete. Egypt seems to be the best performing Arab/ North African country, yet it is still hovering near levels achieved by Israel back in the 60s. Turkey seems to have experienced exponential patent growth outperforming Israel and Sweden, post the year 2000. It is interesting to note that the exponential growth pattern in Turkey's GDP mimics that of the patents awarded. However, the correlation between GDP and intellectual property is beyond the scope of this study, and a counter-example could be easily noticed in the case of Saudi Arabia.
A log base 2 chart was added for better understanding and to include South Korea in the mix. As of 2014, South Korea was awarded 164073 patents, while Turkey gained 4766; unfortunately, Tunisians capitalized on 142 only.
The low number of patents awarded to Tunisia is of great concern and cognizant authorities need to pay attention to such a futuristic index.
Many articles indicate that the success in awarded patents and great innovation in the US is mainly the result of government-funded projects. The intellectual property engine in the US for instance is known to be the result of great military research and development programs as well as influence from institutions such as NASA or other research labs such as DARPA.
There is a common belief that the language barrier is impeding many Tunisians from greater publication numbers. However, with many observations from countries such as China, or North Korea someone could quickly make a case to dilute such a comment.
Greater research will be carried out to account for granted patents per capita among other factors. The main takeaway message of this note is that, in parallel to the comprehensive ongoing educational reform in the country, preparing students for publication skills and mastering intellectual property should also be included in the reform mix.
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