Weekly Korean IP Headlines 01.23. 2013

This week, we would like to introduce Graphene indistry of Korea and its patent status based on BBC News article which quoted Cambridege IP and Korean Chosun Biz.

According to Korean Chosun Biz on January 17th,  Korea became the leading research country of the ‘wonder material,’ grapheme field.   UK’s BBC News quoted Cambridge IP on 15th, “Most striking of all the figures is that the South Korean electronics giant Samsung leads the corporate field with an immense total 407 patents.  America’s IBM is second with 134.” 

Graphene is a ‘honeycomb’ sheet of carbon just one atom thick basking in a sea of de=localized electrons. Since its discovery, grapheme has been seen to have great potential for many different areas of technological innovation. There are high hopes that one day it will be a replacement for silicon as the material for transistors in electronics. Andre Geim and Konstantin Noveslov of the University of Manchester win the Nobel Prize for Physics as a result of their breakthrough with this ‘wonder’ material.  According to BBC News, it is “far stronger than diamond, much more conductive than copper and as flexible as rubber.” 

© BBC | Graphene

It is also worth to noting that Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University leads the grapheme research with 134 patent publications among worldwide university institutes. From the international perspective, China leads the way with 2,200 patents to the US’s 1,754, and South Korea a close third at 1,160 and the next is UK with 54 patents. 


© BBC | Research Institue rank of number of graphne patent publicatiosn

It is considered that Korea became the leading country of grapheme research because entities recognized the value of grapheme, invested and cooperated with university institutes.

Professor Geim, told that many Western companies lack the ability to pursue research.  “Industry is more worried not about what can be done, but what competitors are doing – they’re afraid of losing the race.  There is a huge gap between academia and industry and this gap has broadened during the last few decades after the end of Cold War, so I try as much as I can to reach to the industry.  If something is happening in Korea it’s because Samsung have an institute-there is nothing like that in this country”

© BBC | Professor Geim

Transparency, strength, conductivity and the substance’s flexible and stable nature means that graphene has immense potential in the development of touch screens.  Other theoretical uses included enhancement of solar cells, aiding drug delivery and building new tissue in medicine.

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