Patenting activities in Turkey: The case of the textile industry

Turkey has made considerable progress over the past decade in transforming its economy into a global market economy. This transformation facilitates its integration into the European Union (EU) through the membership negotiations. In this context, several reforms including economic and technical regulations have been carried out. Some incentive programs have been introduced to enhance research and development (R&D) activities. As a consequence there has been an increasing trend in patenting activities. In the literature, there have been several studies which focus on the patenting activities of different countries within different scopes. In the same perspective, this paper presents two main categorical analyses for the patenting activities taking place in Turkey. The first category includes an overall analysis of patenting in Turkey. In this category, patent applications and the granted patents are both included to examine the distribution of domestic and foreign patents in various technological fields for the years between 1995 and 2006. In the second category, the textile and paper patents have been analyzed. The range of the data for this category has also been expanded by the inclusion of the patent applications received between 1980 and 2006. For both of the categories, the “International Patent Classification” (IPC) system has been employed to assess the current status of technology in Turkey. The country origins and the technology classes of the applications have been presented. The general picture of patenting activities in Turkey, as well as that of the specific textile industry in Turkey, has been drawn.