Magdi Abdel-Aziz wavered a lot before taking his concept and preliminary designs to the Egyptian Patent Office. He was nervous because he was neither a doctor nor a specialised scientist. He had simply had an innovative idea that he felt merited patenting. That was on a spring morning 24 years ago.
It took four years for the patent to come through, and it had to go through the courts first. After submitting all the required documents, Abdel-Aziz heard nothing further from the Patent Office. Then a year later, he received a rejection notice, with no explanation.
He appealed to the office’s dispute resolution committee, which recommended that the patent should be approved, but he still did not receive it. He then filed a suit with the Council of State, which eventually ruled in his favour. At last, in 2004 the Patent Office granted him the signed and sealed certificate. But it was an experience he vowed never to repeat.
“Having to go to court to get a patent made me think twice about inventing something new,” he said. He has since kept track of developments related to inventions in Egypt, adding “I can tell you there is zero appreciation for inventors in Egypt.”
He is not alone. Dozens of inventors have experienced similar ordeals, inspiring the present data-driven investigation into what is hampering the registration and marketing of patents in Egypt despite the country’s many innovative, talented, and scientifically qualified minds.
Data from the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS) and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) show a decrease in the number of patent applications submitted by Egyptian innovators from 2012 to 2022 and in the number of patents granted. The information also reveals a dearth of marketing for the patented inventions.
CAPMAS publishes an annual patents bulletin, which comes out in July every year. An analysis of the bulletins from the decade between 2012 and 2022 shows a decline in the rate of Egyptians receiving patents in Egypt. They received 1,065 patents out of a total of 5,972, with an average of no more than 97 patents per year and not exceeding 18 per cent of the total patents granted.
The number of patent approvals for Egyptians fluctuated, reaching a peak in 2019 with 175. This fell to nearly a third of that figure in 2021, with only 63 patents, marking the lowest year in the period. Meanwhile, in that same year, Egyptians registered 116 patents in offices abroad, according to the data available on the WIPO website, which was updated in July 2023.
A similar fluctuation was observed in patent applications, the first step in a complex procedural and legal process. An analysis of CAPMAS databases shows an overall decline in the number of applications submitted by Egyptians over the past 10 years. Again, 2022 marked a nadir with a total of only 589 applications. Foreign patent applications constituted the lion’s share of applications in Egypt at around 70 per cent.
Over the past 20 years, Heba Al-Rahman Ahmed, a specialist in mining engineering, laser applications, and materials science, has submitted 56 applications and obtained 27 patents. Unlike Abdel-Aziz, she was undeterred by the many hurdles and overcame them all. Moreover, she founded, along with others, an association for inventors and then a syndicate that she has headed since 2012.
The application process is where many inventors fall by the wayside in seeking to patent their inventions. For Ahmed, the problems begin earlier on in the educational system, however, as this does not properly educate students in the concept of intellectual property. Then comes the examination process for the patent, which can take up to 20 years, as occurred with one of her applications.
Ahmed said that on the Patent Office’s official website it states that processing procedures can take at least 12 months and perhaps exceed 18 months in many cases.
A researcher at the National Research Centre (NRC), who preferred to remain anonymous, agreed that the long examination period and complicated procedures are chronic problems. She submitted all the required documents to patent her research results in biotechnology a year and nine months ago and has not yet received a response. Although such long waiting periods are “common knowledge” among researchers, she believes that such a long duration is not appropriate for scientific research, which advances every day.
Al-Ahram Weekly approached Gina Al-Feki, acting president of the Academy of Scientific Research, the supervising body of the Egyptian Patent Office, to learn her opinion. She attributed the low number of patents granted annually to several reasons, one of them being that most applicants are not specialists. For example, she said, the academy had received a large number of applications to register pharmaceutical products and vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic. But most were not based on solid scientific foundations and often did not include a full disclosure of the invention.
Moreover, many applications fail to meet the requirements for a patent, one of the most important being the “inventive step,” meaning that the invention should be substantially different from anything previously known and not obvious to experts in the field.
Tarek Kabil, a molecular genetics and biotechnology specialist and former supervisor of the Technology Development Sector at the Academy of Scientific Research, testifies to the progress seen by the Egyptian Patent Office. However, he still believes that Egypt’s patent output is not commensurate with the number of research institutions and prestigious universities in the country.
He would like to see this change, as patents add to science, and they are a measure of scientific and technological progress and innovation. China and the US are the world leaders in patent applications and approvals.
PATENT JOURNEY: Ahmed’s journey with invention began in November 1997 when she discovered a high-performance composite material that was stronger or more resistant to various forces than the original material.
Her professor advised her to patent it. Taking his advice, she submitted the required documents to the Egyptian Patent Office. The next meeting occurred a year and a half later, which is when the examination process began. That took several more years until, finally, the patent was granted in April 2001.
There have been no further interviews or other follow-ups. Ahmed believes that the long examination period was due to insufficient examiners and perhaps the lack of examiners in all specialties.
According to the WIPO database, the average processing time from the examination request to the first office action in Egypt is 540 days, while the average in the 77 countries listed in the WIPO database is 367 days.
The anonymous NRC researcher raised similar questions about the availability of examiners. According to the WIPO database, the Egyptian Patent Office has about 100 examiners, while the average number of examiners in offices worldwide is 209. The US Patent and Trademark Office has the highest number with 8,000 examiners, for example. Egypt ranks 25th out of 100 countries in the WIPO database on this index.
A comparison between Egypt and the nine countries closest to it in terms of the number of patent application submissions during a given period shows Egypt coming last in terms of applications granted during that period, according to WIPO data. Egypt also had the longest examination process, though half the countries in the sample had fewer examiners in their offices compared to Egypt.
Despite inventors’ criticisms of the long examination period, Al-Feki maintains that the procedures conform with international agreements, most notably the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement. The examination process, she said, generally requires that the examiners contact the applicant to meet certain requirements or make any necessary amendments within a specified period before reaching a determination to grant a patent.
In most countries, the process takes two to four years, and the patent, if approved, is granted for 20 years. These conditions apply in Egypt as well. The Egyptian examiners have diverse specialisations, from pharmacy, chemistry, biotechnology and engineering to agriculture, physics, electronics, mechanics, and more. Applications are examined by an examiner in the same scientific or technological specialisation as the invention or the closest one to it.
Interviews with several inventors indicated that they had encountered the same challenges in obtaining patents. This even applied to those who work for research organisations that support them.
To address the problems, an initiative by the Academy of Scientific Research has established a network of innovation support offices. The offices have helped researchers with the patent registration process, according to both a researcher at the NRC and CAPMAS data. The NRC has the highest record of granted patents in the past decade: 164 out of the 253 patents obtained by academic and research entities in Egypt during that period.
The researcher at the NRC told the Weekly that she had not seen any active marketing for patented research during the 15 years she has worked for the centre. She believes that this is due to a lack of financial resources. Industrial research has better marketing prospects than human health research, which takes longer to patent because of the necessary clinical trials. The process can take decades and the necessary research facilities may not be available to researchers.
Technology Innovation and Commercialisation Offices (TICO) have been established at the NRC and several universities, she said. “But the fact is that communication with researchers is almost non-existent. In recent years, some of my colleagues have produced results that could probably have had a promising commercial future. Unfortunately, nothing happened. This is a big disincentive for researchers who wonder why they should go through all the complex registration procedures for nothing.”
In contrast, Wafaa Haggag, who supervises the NRC’s Patent Liaison Office, argues that the establishment of this office in one of Egypt’s largest research organisations has been instrumental in facilitating communication with researchers and the patenting application and follow-through processes. But she agreed that communication with the industry and cooperation between universities and research centres are poor.
The NRC has worked to overcome these problems by organising conferences and scientific symposiums, building partnerships with the private sector and organising exhibitions for research products and patents, she said.
Haggag told the Weekly that she has also marketed four of her 27 patents on her own. Inventors tend to shy away from the Innovation and Development Agency, which is responsible for marketing, because they see it as another instance of bureaucratic red tape, she said. According to CAPMAS data, only 97 of the 170 inventions submitted to the Agency in the past decade were marketed.
Al-Feki counters that the Agency does support Egyptian inventions, helping them to reach the mass production and marketing stages. It also works with various entities to promote innovative solutions to pressing social problems and it supports efforts to link the scientific research community to industry in order to introduce new products to the market.
In March 2017, the agency launched its “Apply Your Idea” programme, through which it supported 67 innovations through two phases and eight prototypes. Since 2019, it has marketed 29 innovations in collaboration with 29 research entities, universities, government agencies, and private firms.
“The crucial factor is putting the patented product to work,” molecular geneticist and biotech scientist Kabil said. “However, Egyptian industries prefer to rely on imported technologies rather than on autonomous locally developed ones, which does not incentivise local technological development.”
He added that most of those who have managed to turn their patents into commercial products are researcher-entrepreneurs who have launched their own enterprises. The implication is that more efforts must be made to connect industry with innovators and inventors, especially given the explosion in technical education in the newly founded technology schools.
“Inventions do not only have to come out of labs or practical research,” Kabil said.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP: The experience of private research facilities has been much the same as that of those in the public sector, especially as concerns marketing.
According to Ingy Darwish, senior licensing manager at the American University in Cairo (AUC) Patent Office, the marketability of the product is the main factor when registering inventions and determining the country to register them in. Although the AUC Office participates in international platforms dedicated to showcasing innovations and inventions and in technology transfer exhibitions and conferences in Egypt and abroad, the marketing rate remains slow, as links with industry are still low.
“I will never register a patent in Egypt again,” vowed George Abdel-Masih Zaki, who has 16 patents, only five of which are registered in Egypt. He sums up the difference between the processes in Egypt and abroad in a few words —“lack of interest.”
The patent he obtained abroad in a year and a half took eight to 13 years to complete in Egypt, where the process was also accompanied by accusations of intellectual theft. The main problems, according to his experience, are with the quality of the examiners, registration costs, and lack of communication with the researcher.
WIPO data back him up. Out of all the applications Egyptian researchers submitted to 36 offices worldwide from 2012 to 2021, 38 per cent were granted patents abroad compared to 11 per cent in Egypt.
In Ahmed’s opinion, the government should set a national patent goal to “stimulate a renaissance in innovation” in Egypt. Towards this end, it should streamline registration procedures and patenting processing, provide training and awareness-raising courses for research entities and individuals, increase the number of examiners, and solicit help from university professors.
Kabil suggests offering further incentives to researchers, such as a financial reward for a patent or a job promotion.
The NRC researcher agreed. “We have no shortage of intellectual and scientific talent. What we need is more development and funding. I can’t say funding is unavailable, but it is insufficient. Suffice it to say that researchers abroad get the materials and equipment they need within three days, whereas in Egypt it takes six months plus a lot of hassle and red tape. The world is not going to wait for us to catch up.”
In 2023, Egypt passed Law 163 establishing the Egyptian Intellectual Property Authority to replace the multiple entities responsible for intellectual property in Egypt, including the Patent Office. The question in many people’s minds is whether this can now achieve the desired breakthrough in streamlining the patenting process and encouraging innovation.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 30 January, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: