The IP5, a group of the world's five largest patent offices, released its 2012 IP5 Statistics Report recently. The report is available to the public on the organization's website.

The IP5 consists of the U.S. Department of Commerce's United States Patent and Trademark Office, the European Patent Office, the Japan Patent Office, the Korean Intellectual Property Office and the State Intellectual Property Office of the People's Republic of China.

The Report is meant to gauge inventive activity and technology flow, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. It also serves to help IP5 members compare procedures among themselves. The report has been released since 1983, at which time it was a project of the Trilateral Cooperation - the European Patent Office, the Japan Patent Office and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

In 2012, the IP5 Offices granted nearly 924,000 patents, representing a 17 percent year-over-year increase. There were 1.876 million patent applications filed with IP5 member offices, an increase of 11 percent from 2011.

Together, the IP5 offices handle 89 percent of the world's patent applications.