Having new ideas is the key to any company's future. But protecting those ideas and leveraging the intellectual capital they represent is just as vital. Jérôme Plante-Bordeneuve, director in charge of managing Thales’s technological assets, explains why.

Like many tech companies, Thales makes a big deal about the number of patents it holds. Why is this number so important? 

Primarily because it's a key indicator of our potential for innovation. Being inventive has been part of the Group’s DNA since it was founded 130 years ago, and today it's more crucial than ever. You could even say invention is the key to our long-term growth, so it's tremendously important to protect our new ideas as effectively as possible. 

And we do that by filing patents?
That’s right. Our inventions are key differentiators – they're what set us apart from the competition. So filing a patent claim to describe exactly what we have invented is the only way of preventing another company or organisation from using it.

The patent claim defines the legal scope of the protection and establishes the patent holder's exclusive right to exploit the invention. It's a guarantee that a firm’s competitors will not be able to use its new ideas for their own purposes. Clearly this is vitally important for us, but it's also crucial for our customers, because it provides them with an assurance that they are the only ones who will benefit from our inventions.

What are the numbers behind Thales’s output in terms of intellectual property?  

Every year, we apply for patents on around 350 to 400 inventions. Our portfolio includes over 22,000 patents, divided into approximately 6,000 families. They're applicable in more than 50 countries, so they give us a huge amount of leverage in international markets. And of course it's our inventors who make this possible. So far, more than 3,500 Thales researchers and engineers have contributed to our patent applications. 

Another important statistic is that almost 50% our new patent filings relate to our key technologies – in other words the technologies that will power our future growth. In artificial intelligence, for example, we are filing patent claims on 40 to 50 new inventions every year. Our other key technologies are Big Data, cybersecurity, mobility, the Internet of Things, augmented reality and cloud technologies – not to mention quantum, which is going to be incredibly important in the future. 

Thales’s patent portfolio is remarkable for its sheer diversity. And that breadth of technologies was also eminently clear in the Invention Awards that Thales organised recently. Can you tell us something about that?

The main purpose of the in-house Invention Awards is to pay tribute to Thales’s inventors, whose creativity and passion for what they do are pushing back the limits of science and technology while at the same time helping to drive the Group’s growth. The Invention Awards are also an opportunity to recognise the hard work of the intellectual property officers and correspondents who manage our patent portfolio and keep our inventions protected.

The latest edition of the Awards focused on inventions that were first published in 2022 and filed in the previous 18 months, not including patents that are classified or filed jointly with other companies or organisations.

Based on those criteria, we had a list of 300 inventions, three of which were selected. The first of the winning inventions is in the field of quantum sensors; the second is a way of withstanding attacks on post-quantum cryptography certificates; and the third makes it possible to use 4G/5G networks for military applications undetectably, while still complying with the 4G/5G standards.

As you can see, these inventions have a very broad range of applications. And I can tell you that many of the inventions which did not make it through to the final phase are equally promising and fascinating.