Billion dollar journey of the patented academician…

Why should academics apply for a patent?

Did you know that intellectual property and patent rights can be obtained for each scientific output developed in the world of research and development and academia? The inventions that scientists and academics will register in their names can earn them a fortune in the long run.

Here is one of three people who received this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Japanese chemist Dr. Akira Yoshino, who became the leading name in the lithium-ion battery market of 26 billion Euro. His story started with a patent application in 1983.

Born in Suita in the north of Osaka in 1948, Dr. Yoshino is the inventor of the first safe, reproducible and modern lithium-ion battery. Its revolutionary technology is widely used all over the world today through smart phones, laptops and electric vehicles.

Dr. Yoshino made its patent application for the first time in 1983 for the lithium-ion battery used in mobile phones and many devices. Currently, he is the owner of 56 Japan-based intellectual property rights and the inventor of 6 European-based patent rights, which help protect the continuous innovations he makes in the field of battery.

Asahi Kasei, the battery company that Yoshino has been working with since the 1970s, had 17 percent of its global market share for lithium-ion battery separators until 2016. The worldwide lithium-ion battery market is estimated to be worth 26.5 billion Euro in 2017, and is expected to exceed 80 billion Euro in 2025.

Earlier this year, Akira Yoshino won the European Inventor Award. This award is given to both individual inventors and inventor teams each year by the EPO (European Patent Office) to honor and grant the recognition they deserve.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Yoshino for working on a modern lithium-ion battery. However, many inventors had been working on similar solutions before. For example, the American Wilson Greatbatch registered his idea in the field of batteries for pacemaker developers in the early 1970s. The invention of Greatbatch made the pacemaker reliable and the battery self-discharge was very low. This revolutionary battery evolution had a huge impact on cardiac patients all over the world, because in this way they needed only one pacemaker during their lifetime.

In the 1970s, Groth & Co submitted applications for about 30 patents for Greatbatch and his company in Sweden, most of them related to lithium-ion batteries and pacemakers. This year, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to John B Goodenough and M Stanley Whittingham, along with Akira Yoshino, for their contribution to the development of the lithium-ion battery.