Europe’s ability to compete globally increasingly depends on how effectively it can scale advanced technologies into commercially viable innovation – be that healthtech, biotech or other digital innovation. But one area that stands out as having huge potential is quantum tech.

But to fully take advantage of quantum technology, standards will need to underpin innovation. Standards are critical to the digital economy, particularly for technologies such as 5G, Wi-Fi, and major video codecs. These standards routinely incorporate patented inventions, since patents provide the incentive to invest in the research and development on which standards depend.

This creates an inherent tension between rewarding that innovation and ensuring the widest possible access to the resulting standard. To balance rewarding innovation with access, standards development organisations (SDOs) mandate that holders of standard-essential patents (SEPs) license these patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.

However, FRAND lacks a fixed royalty rate, which can lead to disputes between SEP holders and implementers, escalating costs, and sometimes pushing negotiations into litigation. While SDOs have not defined FRAND, court decisions have contextualised its meaning, revealing significant gaps and points of convergence, as well as meaningful advancements in how FRAND is operationalised in practice.

Patents and standards

To address the big issues, the European Patent Office (EPO) published a new study compiling more than 60 court documents across seven jurisdictions.

To further enhance transparency in the relationship between patents and standards and examine what it might mean for developing a quantum tech sector in Europe, the EPO held an event at Euractiv at the end of June.

Pere Arque Castells, stream leader for legal and innovation policy at the European Patent Office (EPO) presented the study. He outlined the principles that FRAND is based on and the role of patents for its determination.

“The patent system has been instrumental in the development of advanced connectivity standards and could play an equally important role in quantum technologies. With its unique collection of prior art supporting strong patents in standards-related fields, the EPO is ready to help lay the foundations for quantum standards,” he said.

“Europe has world-class quantum research. The next challenge is to turn this excellence into industrial capacity, trusted standards and real market adoption,” agreed Oscar Díez, deputy head of unit for Quantum Technologies at the European Commission’s DG CNECT.

Díez explained: “At the beginning we were focused more on research, but recently we have been moving into more industrialisation levels on these technologies. So, we have been doing public procurement.”

“We have launched EuroQCI, which is a project on quantum communications. We have also launched the procurement of quantum computers as part of EuroHPC. Now with the Quantum Act, the challenge will be to move this technology from lab to commercialisation.”

Quantum leadership

Dr Aura Salla MEP, a member of the European Parliament’s industry committee (ITRE), agreed that “the situation is, for Europe, a little bit difficult.”

“We are leading in quantum when it comes to research. Our problem is that we cannot commercialise. And that is our problem in many, many sectors, of course. First, we need to ensure we have the demand, but we must also make sure that we will have fast licensing procedures, so that our own companies and the public sector will use European solutions,” Salla continued.

Alexandra Paul, head of global public policy at Pasqal, said: “Europe’s quantum leadership will depend on its ability to turn its homegrown champions into global leaders by shaping industry-relevant international standards, protecting world-class innovation through robust IP frameworks and prioritising real-world use cases that drive market adoption.”

She explained that Pasqal is a good example of that. “It’s actually a global quantum computing leader today. So still a startup but because we are about 270 employees, we are no longer an SME.”

“We are part of a global ecosystem. As of today, we have actually delivered three quantum computing machines across Europe in the framework of EuroHPC joint undertaking, and we also have some quantum computers in Canada and in Saudi Arabia that are already operational. So quantum computers are now getting to the market, and this acceleration phase is very important,” added Paul.

Foundations of ETSI

Martin Chatel, chief policy officer for the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) started by saying that ETSI has been laying the foundations of quantum pre-standardisation work since 2008 and last year created a technical committee in quantum technologies.

He explained that its focus is on the next generation of quantum communications, networks and security solutions like quantum sensing.

He continued: “I would say what’s important is to leverage the European success stories and look at what has worked and try to replicate it. But also be realistic on what can work and what cannot work.”

“In today’s world, it’s quite unrealistic to expect all global players who work on quantum to be represented in every case where we need standards. We see that all the major economies like China or the US are strengthening their domestic ecosystem while only engaging internationally where it serves their direct interest.”

He said that from his perspective, Europe should be able to adopt the same pragmatic approach when addressing emerging technologies and not adhering by default “to this international first standards dogma which has been there for quite some time.”

Dangerous dependencies

Salla added that “Europe should really be proud of what we have and not lean towards the US or have these dangerous dependencies with China, but really be proud of our own companies and make sure that they want to stay in this continent because we have something to offer to the global world.”

Diez also agreed that “we have the right ingredients” but said “we need to do our homework here at the European level” to deliver better coordination between the member states.

Paul argued that “if we want Europe to become a global quantum powerhouse, we need to really act at speed and to learn from the past. We don’t lead in AI; we don’t lead in the cloud. There are some lessons learned from the speed we had in these markets.”

Finally, Arque Castells repeated that “Europe is strong in standards. It has champions in technological standards. And we want that to continue like this. Standards are important for the economy and for competitiveness. And Europe has a very promising future in quantum, but this has to be materialised, and it has to unfold. And we have to make this reality happen. Patents will continue to be important, and the European Patent Office will support in granting strong patents in quantum as it does for all technological domains.”

[BM]