Intelectual property as the element of the steel industry innovative potential

The Steel industry companies operate in difficult and changing environment of significant competitive pressure. Trying to strengthen their market position, continuous search for competitive advantages must be carried out. This is done in both strategic and operation fields, however steel industry companies do not undertake courageous strategic decisions concerning investment projects. So far, cost optimization was the predominating strategy, enabling maintenance of the competitive position on the market, nevertheless this strategy has to drain someday. Steel industry faced new development challenges. Innovations are among the methods, enabling increase of the efficiency of resources management. Can we, however, observe the supply of the protected innovations? At which stages of the value chain creation process can they be observed? Article provides analysis of the availability of innovations in that field, with emphasis on European patents. Therefore, development of the methodology for seraching protected innovations and their statistical analysis in the context of steel industry value chain, became the main goal of this article.