UPDATE

The Italian Patent and Trademark Office (UIBM) has recently released statistics about patent filings and grants in the year 2021. Patents for inventions reached the highest number ever of 11.031 patent applications filed. This number is just a little bit higher than the 10.977 patent applications for invention filed in 2020.

Thus, in the last two years, the number of patent applications filed was stable and pretty higher than the filings of the previous years, which in the last decade were always comprised between 9.000 and 10.000 filings.
In 2021, 7.248 patents for invention were granted by the office.

The higher number of filings of the last two years is also the result of the government incentives reserved for the innovative start-ups, which brought them to file almost 2.000 patent applications in 2020 and 2021, thus providing a huge contribution to the increase of filings in the last two-year period.

About the patents for utility model, 2.030 patents of this kind were filed last year. This number is in line with the average number of filings in the last five years, but less than the peak number of 2.389 patents for utility model that were filed in 2020. 

The number of European patents validated in Italy dramatically drops in the last two years considering the 44.547 validations of 2019, then dropped to the 41.401 validations of 2020 and finally to the 36.192 validations of 2021.

Waiting for the release of the EPO statistics related to 2021, it should be noted that this trend reflects the decrease of EP patents granted by the EPO, that granted the highest number ever of 137.784 patents in 2019, then decreased to 133.709 patents granted in 2020. However, while the number of EP patents granted dropped about 3% from 2019 to 2020, in Italy the number of EP patents validated dropped about 7% in the same period, with a rate of decrease that is almost double than the continental one.