Research Discussion Papers, Bank of Finland
No 22/2009:
Does State Street lead to Europe? The case of financial exchange innovations
Mari Komulainen ()
and Tuomas Takalo ()
Abstract: We study whether and to what extent financial exchange
innovations are in practice patentable in Europe. We find that
exchange-related applications initially increased significantly after the
State Street decision but subsequently decreased. The clear majority (65%)
of applications come from the U.S. investment banks and exchanges
themselves being among the most active innovators. But patents were not
easly granted in response to these applications (only 3% of them led to
valid patent). The high post-grant opposition rate (41%) for granted
patents indicated that competitors tightly monitored each other’s patents.
The evidence, as augmented with clinical case studies, supports the notion
that, for an invention to pass the inventive step requirement for obtaining
a European patent, it should have technical features for solving a
sufficiently challenging technical problem. Our evidence suggests that
patentability standards for financial methods have not weakened in Europe
in the aftermath of the State Street decision and that the inventive step
requirement constitutes a major obstacle for applicants to overcome in
order to obtain a financial exchange patent in Europe.
Keywords: finance patents; financial innovation; business method patents; patent policy; management of intellectual property in financial services; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: G24; G28; K29; O32; O34; (follow links to similar papers)
53 pages, September 22, 2009
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- This paper is published as:
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Komulainen, Mari and Tuomas Takalo, (2013), 'Does State Street lead to Europe? The case of financial exchange innovations', European Financial Management, Vol. 19, June, No. 3, pages 521-557
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