Patent applicationsSiemens is European Patent Champion
With 174,317 applications, the European Patent Office reported a new record last year. The most active European company was Siemens. The last time the company led the field in Europe was in 2011.
The importance of open innovation is demonstrated by the 'Caipirinha' process for faster and better magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans developed by scientists Dr. Mark Griswold (42) and Dr. Peter Jakob for (55, right) Siemens Healthineers. Peter Jakob holds the Chair of Experimental Physics at the University of Würzburg. Griswold is a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, USA. He is an expert in MRI technology, MR fingerprinting and quantitative imaging. The two inventors met in the 1990s and began researching MR technologies together. As part of his doctoral thesis at the University of Würzburg, Griswold invented the 'Grappa' method, a precursor to 'Caipirinha', and one of the first parallel imaging methods. Jakob and Griswold then jointly developed 'Caipirinha', which goes one step further in terms of acceleration and is used by Siemens Healthineers under license. This is a combined data acquisition and reconstruction process that makes it possible to retroactively separate the images that were acquired in parallel. This significantly improves the image quality. Jakob and Griswold were honored in the 'Open Innovation' category.