A new study by the World Intellectual Property Organization paints a picture of a transportation industry very much on the move, with flatlined patenting in traditional, fossil-fuel based technologies and sustainability breakthroughs like electrified roadways and levitating trains experiencing exponential growth. Standardization is the next logical step for future mobility, but participation by industry stakeholders in the standard setting process has lagged, leading one expert to predict, “there is going to be a lot of pain.”
China, Japan, Korea, the US and Germany are leading the transportation revolution.Those five countries account for 90 percent of the global share of future mobility innovation, tallying more than 1 million patents in the field since 2000, according to a report released last week by the World Intellectual Property Organization.
The third installment of the international WIPO’s Technology Trends series (see here) shows a dramatic shift toward sustainability and digitalization across all transportation modalities.
Approximately 41 percent of all land, air, sea and space-related patent families are directed to these two “megatrends,” and within them, four sub-trends — sustainable propulsion, automation and circuitry, communication and security and human-machine interface, or HMI — have emerged.
In 2000, 5,000 sustainability-related patent family publications existed, but today the number has ballooned to 56,500. Similarly, transportation digitalization patents hovered at around 6,000 worldwide in 2000, but now number 66,600 strong.
The dramatic growth rate of future mobility patents is nearly triple the rate of patenting in traditional transportation, but WIPO warns that a focus on growth rates, alone, can’t provide a complete picture of patenting between modalities.
For that, the organization relies on a calculation that combines activity level and growth dynamics, which it said shows “sustainable propulsion and automation and circularity in land transport, and communication and security technologies in both land and space transport as having the highest patent momentum.”
The report makes clear that when it comes to mobility, the future is now.
Whether standardization can meet the moment is less certain.
— Gaps identified —
Getting a cutting-edge technology over the finish line requires investment and ingenuity but even with those building blocks in place, there are no guarantees of success.
A more cost-effective lithium-ion battery can fail out of the gate if it is incompatible with today’s electric vehicles. A novel method for unmanned flight can’t get off the ground if it runs afoul of safety regulations. A bidirectional charger is rendered one-directional without a receiver for its AC electricity.
Pitfalls like these are easier to avoid when robust strategic, technical and certification standards are in place. They provide a baseline for informed decision-making from product design to launch, guiding interoperability, safety, testing, cybersecurity and more.
They also take time to develop and stakeholder participation to succeed.
But in the transportation sector, some say that that participation is lacking — and that time may be running out.
The American National Standards Institute called for “a more coherent and coordinated approach” to standards development in future mobility when releasing their “Roadmap of Standards and Codes for Electric Vehicles at Scale” in 2023. ANSI’s study identified more than three dozen “gaps” standing in the way of widespread electric vehicle, or EV, adoption.
Of those gaps, defined as an issue for which “no published standard, code, regulation, policy, etc.” exists, heavy-duty/high power static wireless charging, error code reporting and the lack of an end-to-end secure trust chain and encryption system for the EV charging ecosystem were deemed high priority by the non-profit organization.
Regarding the latter gap, ANSI says that although “in some cases” communications between electric vehicles and electric vehicle supply equipment “may be fully encrypted,” it is “not clear that other communication channels within the EV ecosystem,” such as from charging stations to an EV service provider or between charging network operators, “are fully secure.”
Robert Garbett, founder of the UK’s Drone Major Group, spent nine years collaborating on the international standard for unmanned aircraft systems, or UASs.
Now that the third edition of ISO 21384 is underway, he’s turned his attention to the development of design verification and certification standards for high-risk specific category operations, such as drone flight over densely populated areas.
Garbett views early participation as a preemptive strike, giving stakeholders a say-so in how technologies which rely on and incorporate Drone Major’s work will be implemented in products and services yet to come.
Joining the conversation late makes it difficult to have an impact, while staying out of the conversation entirely leaves stakeholders exposed. Garbett believes that “if more companies were engaged from the very beginning, there wouldn't be so much pain in the industry.”
“But,” he told MLex, “there is going to be a lot of pain.”
“If you don't have detailed strategic and technical and certification standards, what you then have, because there's no other way of doing it, is heavy regulation. And what heavy regulation does is slow industry down,” Garbett adds.
— Telecom —
There are more than 4,000 standards in place for the telecommunication industry.
For EVs to be deployed at scale in the same way smartphones are used today, transportation industry stakeholders will need to replicate the steps taken by telecom, which remains heavily invested in standards development.
And while patents declared essential to those standards have been at the heart of numerous high-profile, high-cost legal disputes, it’s the conflicts that never materialize, let alone make their way into a courtroom, that are often overlooked when weighing the pros and cons of participating in the standard setting process.
That’s because established standards eliminate much of the guesswork for implementers and innovators, lessening the likelihood that conflict between the two will later arise.
That, in turn, can be a “driving force for further innovation,” according to Won S. Yoon of Fish & Richardson.
Like Garbett, Yoon says that once it becomes apparent a technology is “ripe” for standardization, “it would be wise for companies to be involved in those efforts early and often.”
Doing so not only provides the opportunity to shape the standard, but also opens the door to early patent protection for technologies that are later deemed essential to practice the standard.
His colleague Hyun Jin (HJ) In — who, along with Yoon and Daniel A. Tishman co-authored a white paper last month on the benefits of standardization, standard essential patents and patent pools for the EV and battery industries — views standards collaboration as a form of good IP governance, especially for startups struggling with resource allocation.
If companies go all-in on R&D, for example, In warns they could find themselves playing catch-up in an IP arena where “being first is really, really important.”
“If there's a takeaway here for companies and countries,” he tells MLex, “it would be not to neglect your IP efforts, because it many times ends up being the most valuable thing that you have.”
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