The report, titled “IP-backed Finance in Europe”, highlights the existing imbalance between Europe’s significant innovation potential and the way its financial system operates. Intellectual property-intensive sectors contribute significantly to the EU’s gross domestic product and employment. However, many of them continue to face difficulties in using their intellectual property rights as a means of attracting capital.
In this context, the report highlights that financing is one of the key missing elements for more effective use of intellectual property. Although it plays an increasingly important role in modern business, intellectual property is still rarely accepted as collateral for securing financing. This limits the opportunities for growth, development and increasing the competitiveness of companies.
The report indicates that small and medium-sized enterprises annually face a significant shortage of credit financing, with a large part of this deficit affecting companies with significant intellectual property assets. With the right support, this situation could change. More effective use of intellectual property as a financing tool has the potential not only to facilitate companies’ access to capital, but also to contribute to additional GDP growth of up to €750 billion over the next 10 years.
The report also outlines several key obstacles to the wider use of intellectual property as a financing tool. These include the complexity of valuing intellectual property assets, a fragmented legal framework and underdeveloped markets.
Despite its significant potential, intellectual property still remains largely outside the scope of financial valuations. According to the report, only about 13% of companies that own intellectual property rights have attempted to use them to obtain financing. For most of them, these assets have never been valued by professionals.
As a possible approach to overcoming these challenges, the report identifies five main priorities: increasing the visibility of intellectual property, creating reliable methods for its valuation, promoting its wider use in lending, improving access to data and strengthening coordination between stakeholders.
The EUIPO aims to contribute to efforts to increase Europe’s competitiveness by helping to create conditions under which innovations developed in Europe can be more easily financed, developed and retained within the European market.