The purpose of the Bachelor's thesis is to demonstrate the importance of the patent in a competitive market and in the medical technology industry. The theoretical part is divided into three parts - patent, competition, and interconnection of patent and competition policy. In the beginning, the process of obtaining a patent and the new unitary patent system are shown. The concept of patent and competition is broken down into a legal and economic aspect. In the empirical part, I revealed the industry of medical technology, which is the leader in the number of European patent applications per year. Statistics show that most of the European patent applications are filed by the USA, Germany and Japan. Not only leading monopoly companies such as the Dutch Royal Philips and America's Johnson & Johnson are contributing to the growth of innovation. An overview of the German medical technology industry shows that small and medium-sized enterprises are responsible for a high level of innovation. 92 percent of German medical technology companies are medium-sized, and the number of patents is influenced by more factors than only patent and competition laws. Growth is on one side increased by societal needs of the aging population and on the other, being stopped by new regulations. Due to the benefits of medical technology both in the healthcare and in the economic sector, it would be expected that the number of patents and the number of enterprises in the industry will continue to increase.
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