Is it not about time that we rethink the approach to patents in the wind industry to foster innovation, standardisation and scalability?By Jesper Sloth, Chief Marketing Officer, Polytech, Denmark
‘The Buyer shall own exclusively all intellectual property created in or resulting from the Supplier’s performance under this order.’
This is a standard phrase that many companies in the supply chain are met with in the wind industry. Reading recent articles in which we celebrate the number of patents filed in the industry makes me wonder whether the vast amount of patents is actually positive for the green transition and for the wind industry in general?
In recent years, more than 50% of the patents in the wind industry have been filed by the four large western wind turbine manufacturers. Patents can be a necessity to protect core technology, but the vast majority of these patents are in non-core areas, which would benefit a lot from standardisation, scalability and further innovation.
The first example of this is transport equipment for wind turbine components, which is one of the heavily patented areas, which has driven all wind turbine manufacturers to invent their own solutions, instead of having best practices and standards in the industry that would limit the heavy capex burden that is currently crushing the industry.
The second example is lightning protection systems for wind turbine blades, in which all wind turbine manufacturers are developing and patenting their own approach for protecting carbon blades, while at the same time reducing the amount of blades produced for a given turbine type. This is another example of an area that calls for standardisation and scalability to reduce supply chain risk and to reduce opex and capex.
And there are many more examples.
Several studies show that < 5% of patents are used. The rest are never commercialised and only act as barriers to further innovation, standardisation and thus scalability. Many such patents are driven by patent incentive programmes, which is common in larger corporations (i.e. monetary benefits to employees that author or co-author patents) because the more patents the merrier.
Maybe it is about time that we reconsider the approach to patents in the industry, stop celebrating high numbers of patents and rewrite the standard contracts slightly to allow innovation and scale to thrive in the supply chain?