In 2024, inventors around the world filed a record 3.7 million patent applications, 4.9% more than the year before. Asia accounted for seven of every ten. Northern America took 17.1% and Europe 9.7%. Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Oceania accounted for 3% between them.
Patents are an imperfect measure of innovation. A great deal of valuable work is never patented, and a great many patents are never worth anything. But they measure one thing precisely: whether an economy is producing commercial knowledge that somebody considers worth owning.
The figure that matters is not the total
South Africa is the continent's strongest performer on this measure. Its patent office received 8,899 applications in 2024, placing it 21st in the world, ahead of several European economies.
Of those, 350 came from South African residents. The other 8,549, or 96.1% of the total, came from applicants based abroad.
That split is the story. A patent filed by a foreign applicant does not measure what a country invents. It measures what a country is worth selling into. Non-residents file in South Africa to protect products developed elsewhere, in a market they intend to serve.
Nigeria, the continent's largest economy, recorded fewer than fifty resident patent applications in the same year.
Patents follow research, and research follows a system
Research happens at scale only where funding, trained people, institutions and commercial incentives line up to make it worth doing. Where that system is thin, the output is thin, and the patent count reflects it.
Africa has spent four decades investing in industry: manufacturing plants, agro-processing, telecoms, financial services, logistics. Far less went into the research base that would let those industries create rather than adopt. The consequence is visible in the figures above, and in operating accounts across the continent. Licence fees paid abroad. Process technology imported. Equipment specified for other climates and other input profiles. Formulations optimised for other markets.
Adoption is not a failure. Every industrialising economy begins by adopting. The economies that went on to industrialise fully are the ones that built research capacity alongside the capital, so that returns did not level off once the imported technology had been fully deployed.
Where value now sits
In 1975, tangible assets, meaning plant, equipment, property and inventory, accounted for 83% of the market value of the S&P 500. In 2025 they account for 8%. Intangible assets, meaning intellectual property, data, brand and know-how, make up the remaining 92%.
That is a fifty-year shift in what the market pays for: from what a company builds to what it knows and owns. It is the clearest available signal of where corporate value is created, and it has pointed in one direction for half a century.
An economy that does not produce ideas worth protecting is not simply behind on a technical indicator. It is largely absent from the part of the global economy that has been growing throughout that period.
What sits between a firm and a patent
The constraint is rarely a shortage of capable researchers. Consider a manufacturer with a process problem worth solving and a university nearby holding the relevant expertise.
Between the two sits a series of ordinary obstacles. Identifying the right team. Assessing whether it can actually deliver. Translating a commercial problem into a research brief. Contracting with an institution that may have no template for industry work. Agreeing who owns the result. Managing the project to a date the business can plan around.
Each of these is solvable. Together they amount to months of work by someone whose job is running a company. Most firms conclude, reasonably, that it is not worth it. The research is deferred, sent offshore, or never attempted. No patent is ever filed, and the count stays where it is.
What would move the number
Three things, none of which require new universities or new funding programmes.
Firms would need to treat research as procurement rather than philanthropy: a specified brief, a contracted provider, a defined deliverable, a date.
Ownership of the resulting intellectual property would need to be settled before the work begins rather than negotiated after it succeeds.
And the questions would need to originate with industry rather than with funders abroad. A patent is usually the by-product of solving a problem somebody actually has.
The 350 figure is not a verdict on South African science. It is a description of how little of that science has been pointed at commercial problems, on terms that let the results be owned on the continent.
Thinkng is an R&D brokerage platform connecting African businesses to the research providers who can solve their problems, scoping the brief, matching the provider, and managing delivery through to handover.
Sources: WIPO, World Intellectual Property Indicators 2025 (2024 filing data). WIPO Statistics Country Profiles, South Africa and Nigeria, 2024. Ocean Tomo, Intangible Asset Market Value Study, 2025.
