Today more than ever, Europe is focused on sustainable prosperity and competitiveness. Its institutions aim at creating an environment in which businesses can thrive and people can prosper.
It is with this goal ahead that the European Commission tasked Mario Draghi – former President of the European Central Bank and former Italian Prime Minister – to draft a report of his vision of the future of European competitiveness and innovation.
The vast report, available here, deals in the first part with the policies to be adopted in ten major areas of the European economy (energy, critical raw materials, digitalization and advanced technologies, high-speed/capacity broadband networks, computing and AI, semiconductors, energy-intensive industries, clean technologies, automotive, defence, space, pharma and transport). In the second part, the report sets out a number of horizontal policies aimed at accelerating innovation, closing skills gap, sustaining investment, revamping competition and strengthening governance.
In this context, and more specifically in relation to the goal of accelerating innovation, Draghi stressed the need to achieve a more favorable and simpler regulatory ecosystem for innovative companies, underlining repeatedly throughout the report the fundamental role of patents and in general of IP rights protection to sustain innovation. Draghi also noted that the Unitary Patent system is a key tool to achieve such an innovative ecosystem.
In the words of the report, “Fully adopting the Unitary Patent system in all EU Member States would reduce patent application costs, offer broader and uniform territorial protection of IPR for patent holders, and limit litigation uncertainty through the jurisdiction of the Unified Patent Court. To support the uptake of the EU Unitary Patent system and promote the protection of Intellectual Property Rights, training programmes for IPR professionals should be enhanced and possibly subsidized”.
To date, 24 Member States have signed the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPCA), while only 18 Member States have ratified it (Romania just joined the system on 1 September 2024). Ireland is the likely next country to join, although the referendum necessary for the ratification of the UPCA has been deferred to an unknown date.
The emphasis on the Unified Patent system in Draghi’s report not only reaffirms the willingness of the European institutions to continue to support the new court and to work together with the Member States to ensure the adoption and implementation of the UPCA throughout the EU, but also again confirms the relevance of effective and efficient patent protection for the competitiveness of European businesses.