Analysis of the informational environment in the Brazilian patent process

A patent is an important tool for the inventor as it gives him a temporary monopoly of exploitation due to the novelty achieved during research for the invention. Currently Brazilian inventors have 30,000 applications at the INPI, which grants about 900 patent applications per year filed. This gap between patent entry and conclusion occurs largely due to a slow system designed just to coexist with other protection models. This research aimed to analyze the Brazilian patent process, adopting the information perspective observing if it is responsible for the leakage of patent applications from Brazil to abroad. A qualitative and quantitative research was adopted, with a questionnaire introduced via web, as well as a semi-structured interview script, aiming to identify what the inventors perceived in the informational environment of the INPI. It was possible to identify that there is a gap between perception and expectation of the information coming from the INPI to the inventors, generating a noise throughout the patenting process. The interviews carried out corroborate the quantitative questionnaire as they showed discontent regarding both volume, quality and speed of the information presented by the INPI. These data are sufficient to evidence how poor is the Brazilian patent process from an information point of view due to the inventor's expectation becomes very far from the perception after long years of waiting.