Overall, Europe may be losing the race for the huge new business of printed electronics and the rejuvenation of society that it will bring. This is despite having far more academic institutions than East Asia working on the subject, the number being comparable to the number in the USA. That is a possible conclusion from the new IDTechEx report Organic and Printed Electronics in Europe which analyses and compares the activities of 248 European organisations in the sector.
Analyst Cintelliq has issued a report "Inventors 2003-2005" - an analysis of inventors of organic semiconductor patents. They are under the categories LED and Transistors, where the Japanese were the winners in both cases, Photovoltaics and Lasers, where the US led, Sensors, where many European and US inventors were equal with a mere two patents each, Memory cell, with the US leading and Other, with Japan in the lead. In LED (essentially OLED), Shunpei Yamazaki in Japan had 104 patents granted in that period. Europe was the loser.