TU Dortmund — Patent Portfolio Analysis 2019-2024
The patent portfolio of Technische Universitat Dortmund — 64 DOCDB patent families from 123 applications, filed at 9 patent offices under the university's own name and reaching 13 offices across all family members. Measurement is the largest single technology field; 53% of the families take the PCT route.
Executive Summary
Technische Universitat Dortmund as a patent applicant, filing years 2019-2024
Between 2019 and 2024 Technische Universitat Dortmund appears as an applicant on 123 patent applications belonging to 64 DOCDB patent families. That is an average of 1.92 applications per family and, measured by first filing year, between 8 and 15 new families per year. The portfolio was assembled from 26 distinct spellings of the university's name in PATSTAT (37 person records), of which twelve carry filings inside the observation window.
The portfolio is filed well beyond Germany. 34 of the 64 families (53%) contain a PCT application, 29 families contain a European application, and 12 reach the United States. Counting every member of every family, the portfolio touches 13 patent offices; the university itself is a named applicant at nine of them. At the same time 24 families (38%) never leave a single office — a national German filing that was not pursued abroad.
Technologically the portfolio spreads wide rather than deep. Measured on WIPO technology fields, Measurement is the largest single field with 18 families, followed by Telecommunications with 8. At IPC subclass level G01N (investigating materials) leads with 12 families, ahead of G01R (measuring electric variables) and H04B (transmission) with 6 each. No subclass covers more than a fifth of the portfolio. Representative filings range from photoacoustic gas sensors and passive radio reflectors to DNA-encoded chemical libraries and the biotechnological production of cannabinoids.
Co-filing is the exception rather than the rule: 10 of the 64 families (16%) carry a second applicant, spread over twelve distinct partners. The Max-Planck-Gesellschaft is the only partner appearing on more than one family. 14 families (22%) already contain a granted member, a figure that will rise as the more recent filings complete examination.
TU Dortmund files a small, technologically broad portfolio and invests selectively in international coverage: just over half of all families take the PCT route, while nearly four in ten remain a single national filing. The pattern is consistent across the whole period rather than the result of one strong year.
Filing Trend 2019-2024
New patent families by first filing year, against the number of applications filed each year.
Filing volume is flat rather than trending: between 17 and 23 applications in every year of the period. New families per year move between 8 and 11 from 2020 onwards. The higher 2019 figure is partly an artefact of the window boundary — families whose first priority predates 2019 are counted in 2019 if any of their members was filed that year. On these small annual numbers a compound growth rate would be arithmetic rather than evidence, so none is stated.
Data table: Annual filing activity 2019-2024
| Year | New patent families | Applications filed | Of which granted |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 15 | 20 | 5 |
| 2020 | 9 | 22 | 3 |
| 2021 | 10 | 17 | 1 |
| 2022 | 8 | 23 | 4 |
| 2023* | 11 | 21 | 2 |
| 2024* | 11 | 20 | 3 |
| Total | 64 | 123 | 18 |
* 2023-2024: provisional. Applications are published roughly 18 months after filing and reach PATSTAT later still, so the two most recent filing years will continue to fill up (PATSTAT Global, Spring 2026 / patstat_2026a). "New patent families" counts each family once, in the earliest year it was filed within the observation window; the column therefore sums to the portfolio total, while "Applications filed" counts every application in its own filing year. Grant counts are a snapshot: recent filings have not finished examination.
Technology Profile
WIPO 35 technology fields and the five WIPO sectors, counted at family level.
Measurement is the one field that stands out: 18 of 64 families, more than twice the next largest. Beyond it the portfolio is unusually even — Chemistry, Electrical engineering and Instruments each account for 22 families, Mechanical engineering for 15. The year-by-year split moves with single filings rather than with a visible reorientation: Instruments peaks in 2021 and 2023, Chemistry in 2019, Electrical engineering in 2022. With 8 to 15 families a year, one additional filing changes a sector's share by several percentage points, so these movements are better read as spread than as trend.
Non-exclusive counting. A patent family can be assigned to several WIPO technology fields and therefore to several sectors. The sector figures sum to 84 across 64 distinct families, and the field figures sum higher still. Sub-totals in this section must not be added up to the portfolio total.
Data table: WIPO sectors and largest technology fields
| WIPO sector | Families | Largest field inside the sector | Families |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instruments | 22 | Measurement | 18 |
| Chemistry | 22 | Organic fine chemistry | 6 |
| Electrical engineering | 22 | Telecommunications | 8 |
| Mechanical engineering | 15 | Machine tools | 6 |
| Other fields | 3 | Furniture, games | 2 |
| Distinct families | 64 | Sum of sector column | 84 |
Data table: WIPO sectors by first filing year
| Year | Instruments | Electrical eng. | Chemistry | Mechanical eng. | Other fields |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 6 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 0 |
| 2021 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 1 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2 | 5 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023* | 5 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| 2024* | 2 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 1 |
| Total | 22 | 22 | 22 | 15 | 3 |
* 2023-2024: provisional, see the filing trend section. All 64 families carry at least one WIPO technology field. Sector columns are non-exclusive and do not sum to the annual family count.
IPC Analysis
Where the portfolio sits in the International Patent Classification, at subclass level.
The 64 families carry symbols from 75 different IPC subclasses. G01N — investigating or analysing materials — is the only subclass reaching double digits with 12 families, and it sits alongside G01R (measuring electric and magnetic variables, 6 families) and G01M, G01L, G01F, G01H, G01S and G01T with one family each: measurement instrumentation is the recurring theme rather than any single product area. Only 24 of the 75 subclasses reach two families or more; the remaining 51 appear exactly once, which is the classification-level expression of the same spread the WIPO fields show.
Non-exclusive counting. One family normally carries several IPC symbols and therefore appears in several subclasses. Across the 75 subclasses the family counts sum to 128, against 64 distinct families. A pie or doughnut representation would be wrong for this data, which is why horizontal bars are used.
Data table: IPC subclasses with two or more families
| IPC subclass | Title | Families |
|---|---|---|
G01N | Investigating or analysing materials by determining their chemical or physical properties | 12 |
G01R | Measuring electric variables; measuring magnetic variables | 6 |
H04B | Transmission | 6 |
C12N | Microorganisms or enzymes; compositions thereof | 5 |
B29C | Shaping or joining of plastics | 4 |
C07D | Heterocyclic compounds | 4 |
G06F | Electric digital data processing | 3 |
H01Q | Antennas, i.e. radio aerials | 3 |
H02M | Apparatus for conversion between AC and DC | 3 |
H04W | Wireless communication networks | 3 |
A01N | Preservation of bodies of humans, animals or plants; biocides | 2 |
A61K | Preparations for medical, dental or toiletry purposes | 2 |
A61P | Specific therapeutic activity of chemical compounds | 2 |
B01J | Chemical or physical processes, e.g. catalysis | 2 |
B21C | Manufacture of metal sheets, wire, rods, tubes, profiles | 2 |
B21D | Working or processing of sheet metal or metal tubes | 2 |
B81B | Microstructural devices or systems | 2 |
B81C | Processes or apparatus for manufacturing microstructural devices | 2 |
C07C | Acyclic or carbocyclic compounds | 2 |
C09K | Materials for applications not otherwise provided for | 2 |
C12P | Fermentation or enzyme-using processes | 2 |
G05B | Control or regulating systems in general | 2 |
G06Q | ICT specially adapted for administrative or commercial purposes | 2 |
H10K | Organic electric solid-state devices | 2 |
| 51 further subclasses with one family each | 51 | |
| Sum over 75 subclasses (non-exclusive) | 128 | |
| Distinct patent families | 64 | |
Data table: most frequent IPC subgroups
| IPC subgroup | Title | Families |
|---|---|---|
G01N21/17 | Systems in which incident light is modified in accordance with the properties of the material | 3 |
H02M1/44 | Circuits for compensating electromagnetic interference | 3 |
B81B7/02 | Microstructural systems containing distinct electrical or optical devices | 2 |
B81C1/00 | Manufacture or treatment of microstructural devices | 2 |
C09K11/06 | Luminescent materials containing organic substances | 2 |
C12N1/16 | Yeasts; culture media therefor | 2 |
G01N29/04 | Analysing solids (ultrasonic, sonic or infrasonic) | 2 |
G01N29/24 | Probes for acoustic investigation | 2 |
G01N3/32 | Investigating strength by applying repeated or pulsating forces | 2 |
H02M1/12 | Arrangements for reducing harmonics from AC input or output | 2 |
H04B15/00 | Suppression or limitation of noise or interference | 2 |
H10K85/00 | Organic materials used in devices covered by H10K | 2 |
IPC symbols are read from all applications on which TU Dortmund is a named applicant and joined to the classification views on the PATSTAT symbol form. Deprecated symbols are kept: no filter on the active flag was applied, so families classified under retired symbols remain in the counts. Titles follow IPC edition 20260101.
Geographic Strategy
Where TU Dortmund files, and how far its families travel beyond the first office.
The German patent office is the anchor: 49 of 123 applications, and 50 of the 64 families have at least one German member. From there the portfolio splits. 34 families (53%) contain a PCT application and 29 (45%) a European one, while 24 families (38%) stay inside a single office and go no further. Counting every member of every family, the portfolio reaches 13 offices — four more (JP, MX, ES, AU) than the nine at which the university is itself a named applicant. On the members at those four offices the recorded applicant is none of the 37 person records that define this portfolio; the data does not say whether that is a partner acting for the family or a spelling of the university's name that the profile does not reach.
Read the period comparison with care. National and regional phases of a PCT application are normally entered around 30 months after the priority date. Families first filed in 2022-2024 have therefore not had time to produce their EP, US or other national members, and their PCT applications are still counted while the follow-on filings are not. The decline in EP and US applications in the later period is at least partly this timing effect and should not be read as a withdrawal from those markets.
Data table: filing offices
| Office | Applications (TU Dortmund as applicant) | Families (TU Dortmund as applicant) | Families with any member at this office |
|---|---|---|---|
| DE | 49 | 48 | 50 |
| WO | 29 | 29 | 34 |
| EP | 27 | 23 | 29 |
| US | 12 | 12 | 12 |
| CN | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| JP | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| CA | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| IL | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| KR | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| TW | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| AU | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| ES | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| MX | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Total | 123 | sum 118, distinct 64 | sum 136, distinct 64 |
Data table: applications per office and filing year
| Year | DE | WO | EP | US | Other | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 9 | 2 | 5 | 3 | 1 | 20 |
| 2020 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 4 | 0 | 22 |
| 2021 | 8 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 17 |
| 2022 | 6 | 8 | 5 | 1 | 3 | 23 |
| 2023* | 9 | 5 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 21 |
| 2024* | 11 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 20 |
| Total | 49 | 29 | 27 | 12 | 6 | 123 |
* 2023-2024: provisional, see the filing trend section. A family is filed at several offices, so the family columns are non-exclusive and sum above the portfolio total of 64. "Families with any member at this office" counts every application in the family, including members on which TU Dortmund is not itself the named applicant and regardless of IPR type — that column therefore rests on a slightly wider basis than the two application-level columns, which are restricted to patents of invention filed by the university.
Collaborations
Applications on which TU Dortmund shares applicantship with another party.
10 of the 64 families (16%) carry a second applicant, shared among twelve distinct partners. The Max-Planck-Gesellschaft is the only partner appearing on more than one family. Three families carry two co-applicants each: one with the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and Universitat Duisburg-Essen, one with Northeastern University and New York University in Abu Dhabi, and one with GDS Prazisionszerspanungs GmbH and an individual co-applicant. Joint filings occur at a steady one to two per year across the whole period rather than clustering in any one of them.
Data table: co-applicants 2019-2024
| Co-applicant | Type | Joint families | Filing years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Forderung der Wissenschaften e.V. | Research | 2 | 2022-2024 |
| Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Forderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. | Research | 1 | 2021-2022 |
| Technische Universitat Dresden | University | 1 | 2019-2020 |
| Universitat Duisburg-Essen | University | 1 | 2023-2024 |
| Hochschule Hamm-Lippstadt | University | 1 | 2022-2023 |
| Northeastern University | University | 1 | 2024 |
| New York University in Abu Dhabi Corporation | University | 1 | 2024 |
| Bayer AG | Company | 1 | 2020 |
| TRUMPF Werkzeugmaschinen GmbH + Co. KG | Company | 1 | 2020-2021 |
| GDS Prazisionszerspanungs GmbH | Company | 1 | 2022 |
| W2 Armaturen GmbH | Company | 1 | 2024 |
| Bathe, Timo | Individual | 1 | 2020-2022 |
| Distinct families with a co-applicant | 10 | 2019-2024 |
Data table: jointly filed families by first filing year
| Year | Jointly filed families | All families first filed that year |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2 | 15 |
| 2020 | 2 | 9 |
| 2021 | 1 | 10 |
| 2022 | 2 | 8 |
| 2023* | 1 | 11 |
| 2024* | 2 | 11 |
| Total | 10 | 64 |
Partner names were consolidated before counting. PATSTAT holds fifteen harmonised applicant names for these twelve partners. Technische Universitat Dresden appears under two of them and Timo Bathe under three; in both cases all variants sit on the same patent family, so each counts once. Counting the raw name variants would have overstated both partners.
* 2023-2024: provisional, see the filing trend section. Joint families are attributed to the first year in which the family was filed within the observation window. All 37 PATSTAT person records belonging to TU Dortmund were excluded from the partner list, so the university cannot appear as its own collaborator; the partner list was checked and contains no TU Dortmund variant. The "filing years" column gives the years of the applications on which the partner itself is named.
Top Inventors
Named inventors on TU Dortmund applications, counted in patent families.
179 distinct inventors are named on the portfolio, and 63 of the 64 families carry at least one named inventor. Only ten of them appear on three or more families, and the largest single count is six. Inventorship is therefore spread almost as widely as the technology: the portfolio is the sum of many separate inventor teams rather than the output of a few prolific filers. Eight of these ten are named on an application filed in 2024; two appear only in 2019 and 2020.
Data table: inventors named on three or more families
| Inventor | Families | First filing year | Last filing year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Palzer, Stefan | 6 | 2021 | 2024 |
| Böcker, Stefan | 4 | 2021 | 2024 |
| Frei, Stephan | 4 | 2019 | 2024 |
| Wietfeld, Christian | 4 | 2021 | 2024 |
| Brümmer, Andreas | 3 | 2020 | 2024 |
| Hering, Oliver | 3 | 2019 | 2020 |
| Jenau, Frank | 3 | 2019 | 2024 |
| Ortiz Perez, Alvaro | 3 | 2021 | 2024 |
| Tekkaya, A. Erman | 3 | 2019 | 2020 |
| Thommes, Markus | 3 | 2019 | 2024 |
Inventor counts are a lower bound. PATSTAT stores inventor names as written on each application. Names were normalised (case, punctuation and spacing removed) before grouping, which merges spellings such as "AIGNER, JENS" and "AIGNER JENS", but it cannot merge transpositions or typographic variants — one inventor in this portfolio appears both as "Ortiz Perez, Alvaro" and as "Alvaro, Ortz Perez". Where such a split remains, the inventor's family count is understated and the count of distinct inventors overstated.
Filing years are the earliest and latest filing year of the applications on which the inventor is named, within the 2019-2024 window. One family carries no inventor record in this PATSTAT edition.
Methodology
Search strategy, data basis, and known limitations
This report was computed on 15 August 2026 against EPO PATSTAT Global, Spring 2026 (patstat_2026a), with classification titles from IPC edition 20260101 and CPC edition 202608. The portfolio is defined by applicant identity rather than by a classification code set, so neither subtree expansion nor a predecessor union applies to the scope; where IPC symbols are used to describe the portfolio, deprecated symbols were deliberately kept — no filter on the active flag was applied — so that no family is removed from the counts by classification lifecycle alone.
Search strategy, family counting and data source
Search Strategy
The entity was pinned down before anything was counted, because PATSTAT performs no entity resolution and its harmonised name field is wrong for this university.
- Discovery ran over all PATSTAT person records in an applicant role whose name contains "Dortmund", without a year filter, then narrowed to university-type names. This yields 26 distinct name and country variants across 37 person records, of which twelve carry filings between 2019 and 2024.
- The harmonised name field is unusable here. PATSTAT maps the five
largest TU Dortmund spellings — which together account for 68 of the 106 variant-level
family counts in the window — to
han_name = "TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAT MUNCHEN". Matching was therefore done on the written applicant name, and the resulting person records were carried forward as an explicit list of identifiers used by every query. - Deliberately excluded: Fachhochschule Dortmund (a separate university of applied sciences) and the Institut fuer Arbeitsphysiologie an der Universitaet Dortmund (a legally independent Leibniz institute).
- Deliberately included: the pre-2007 institutional name Universitaet Dortmund and the institute record "University of Dortmund INFU". Neither contributes a family inside the observation window.
- Filters applied to every query: applicant role only, filing years 2019 to 2024, design applications excluded, and patents of invention only — which removes one utility model filed in the window.
- Cross-check. The headline figures were recomputed by an independent route that matches on name patterns instead of the identifier list. It returns the same 123 applications, 64 families, 9 filing offices, 14 granted families and 18 granted applications.
Family Counting
- All portfolio figures count DOCDB patent families, never raw applications, so a single invention filed in six countries counts once.
- Adding up the per-variant family counts of the twelve active name variants gives 106. The consolidated distinct count is 64. The difference is families filed under more than one spelling of the university's name, now counted once.
- The annual trend attributes each family to the earliest year it was filed within the window, so the yearly column sums exactly to the portfolio total. The separate application column counts every application in its own filing year.
Multi-Assignment Note
- A patent family can belong to several WIPO technology fields and sectors: the sector figures sum to 84 across 64 distinct families.
- A family normally carries several IPC symbols: across 75 subclasses the family counts sum to 128 against 64 distinct families.
- A family is filed at several offices: the office columns sum to 118 and 136 respectively.
- Because none of these breakdowns is exclusive, no pie or doughnut chart is used anywhere in this report; every such breakdown is shown as bars with the distinct total stated next to it.
Data Source
- EPO PATSTAT Global, Spring 2026 (
patstat_2026a), queried on Google BigQuery. - Classification titles and hierarchy from the depa.tech classification views, IPC edition 20260101 and CPC edition 202608.
- Every figure in this report comes from a query executed for this edition. The complete
SQL ships with the report in
queries.sql.
Scope Limitations
- Family counts are a lower bound. Name harmonisation in PATSTAT is imperfect, and a filing recorded under a spelling that no reasonable profile catches will be missing.
- Utility models and designs are excluded — patents of invention only. One utility model filed in the window is therefore not counted.
- 2023 and 2024 are provisional. Applications are published roughly 18 months after filing and reach PATSTAT later still, so both years will continue to fill up. No growth rate in this report ends in a provisional year.
- Window boundary. Families whose original priority predates 2019 are attributed to 2019 if any of their members was filed that year, which lifts the 2019 column relative to later years.
- Grant status is a snapshot, not a grant rate. 14 of 64 families contain at least one granted member. Applications filed from 2022 onwards have largely not completed examination, so this figure understates the eventual outcome and must not be read as a success rate.
- Negative test. A search for the portfolio's most frequent inventors on applications outside the TU Dortmund applicant set returned only filings by unrelated organisations sharing an inventor name. No additional families were attributed to the university on that basis.
- External plausibility. An independent lookup in EPO Open Patent Services under the standardised applicant names returns 72 publications since January 2020, against 123 applications filed 2019-2024 here. The counting units differ — publications against applications — but the order of magnitude agrees.
- Inventor names may still be split. See the note in the inventor section; the count of 179 distinct inventors is an upper bound and individual family counts are lower bounds.
Glossary — patent terms explained
- Patent family (DOCDB)
- A group of patent applications protecting the same invention in different countries. Counting families instead of applications avoids counting one invention several times.
- Applicant vs. inventor
- The applicant owns the application — here the university. The inventor is the natural person who made the invention. PATSTAT records both roles separately.
- PCT / WO application
- An international application filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty. It reserves the option of national or regional filings for roughly 30 months, but is not itself a granted patent.
- IPC / CPC
- International and Cooperative Patent Classification — hierarchical schemes that place a patent by its technical subject matter. A subclass such as G01N is the fourth level of the hierarchy.
- Harmonised applicant name (han_name)
- PATSTAT's attempt to map spelling variants of an organisation to one name. It is a heuristic and can be wrong, as it is for this university.
- WIPO 35 technology fields
- A standard scheme that maps IPC symbols to 35 technology fields grouped into five sectors, used for comparing portfolios across technical areas.
Report Files
This report consists of meta.json (metadata), cover.html and
kpi-strip.html (hero and key figures), the numbered files in
sections/, and queries.sql — the complete, executable SQL behind
every figure shown, with the PATSTAT and classification editions recorded in its header.
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