Journal of Community Mobilization and Sustainable Development

Innovation generates intellectual assets, where man, money and material are considered as vital inputs. In the emerging trend of managing the innovations, Intellectual Property tools in general and patent tools in specific are important. In India, science is regarded as one of the most powerful instrumentalities for propelling innovation. To strengthen this innovation culture in the country different R&D organizations are working in the field of S & T. The present study is mainly focused on leading Indian R&D organisations, which have subject specific research laboratories/units. This paper is the outcome of assessment of patent filing related data taken from different public and paid search engines. The objective of this study was to understand the patent filing behaviour of Indian R&D organizations and their legal status. Results of the present study revealed that patent filing in the Indian Patent Office is growing, an astonishing 272.50% increase, during the last ten years (2005–2014) as compared to previous 10 years. The Indian R&D assignees except CSIR are showing a comparable upward trend in filing as increase in filing by DRDO (285%), ICAR (209%) and DST (187%), respectively. CSIR is an exception to this as it is showing a declining trend of -53% in 2006–2015 in comparison with 1996–2004. Most of the organizations filed their patent applications at IPO, where CSIR is leading with 7104 applications; followed by IITs (1674); and ICAR (511). It was found that IPC classes viz. A, B, C, D, G, and H were preferred by most of the institutions for their patent filing subject domain. Study shows that CSIR possess the highest number of granted patents i.e. 7780¹, followed by IITs (488), DST (227), IISc (170), DRDO (146), DBT (123), ICAR (70), and ICMR (26). The implications of result displayed by this study will be useful in the augmenting India's new National IPR Policy 2016.