Tracking Europe's competitiveness. Live

Innovation starts long before a product reaches the market, with ideas strong enough to protect. Not every invention is patented, and not every patent becomes a product, but international patent applications remain one of the clearest measures of technological output.

This metric tracks Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications, counted as filings. A PCT application is filed when an inventor wants protection in several markets at once, which makes it a good proxy for inventions with global commercial ambition.

The index scores the total, because a filing competes in world markets whatever the population behind it. The per-million reading, which asks how inventive an economy is for its size, is one click away on the front-page chart. No patent number should be read in isolation, but sustained international patent activity is a strong signal that a country can generate new technologies, feed future industries and compete at the technological frontier.

Europe still produces world-class research. The Draghi Report, the Competitiveness Compass and the Startup & Scaleup Strategy all reach the same diagnosis: the weakness is commercialisation. Too little of that research becomes globally competitive companies.

Recent reforms aim at exactly this. The Unitary Patent simplifies intellectual property protection across Europe, while the Savings and Investment Union and the proposed 28th Regime target the wider conditions for scaling patented technology into businesses.

Patent applications are the start of Europe's innovation pipeline. Their long-term value depends on whether the ideas behind them are commercialised, scaled and kept in Europe.