The European Patent Office reported in its annual report published last week that the inventiveness of Europe’s leading economies is reflected in the ratio of European patent applications filed to population and Switzerland again topped the ranking in 2015, with 873 applications per million inhabitants. Second and third place went to the Netherlands (419) and Sweden (392), followed by Finland (365) and Denmark (346). The first non-European country was again Japan in ninth place (169). Ireland was at (119) compared with the EU28 average (132). The EU was ahead of the US (133), South Korea (130) and China (4).