Date: 15 December 2025

【Volume 162】

In November 2025, the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) officially released a major revision to the Patent Examination Guidelines, which will come into force on January 1, 2026. The amendments signal a meaningful shift in CNIPA’s examination approach, particularly in how inventive step is assessed. While the revised Guidelines introduce changes across multiple procedural and substantive areas, the amendments to the Assessment of Inventive Step (Part II, Chapter 4, Section 6.4) are expected to have the most immediate and tangible impact on patent prosecution practice.

The core principle of the revised Guidelines is to put increased emphasis on the direct correlation between the subject matter described in the claims and the actual technical contribution of the invention.

1. Reaffirmed Principle: Inventive-step assessment must be conducted based on the “technical solution as a whole”

The revisions first reaffirm a long-standing principle: the assessment of inventive step must be conducted based on the overall technical solution as defined by the claims. This clarification underscores that, when evaluating the inventive step, examiners must consider the combination of all technical features and their synergistic effects as a whole, rather than assessing any single feature in isolation.

2. Most Significant Change: The technical features constituting contribution must be explicitly recited in the claims

The most substantive aspect of the revisions is the introduction of a mandatory descriptive requirement regarding the technical features:

“Technical features that constitute the invention’s contribution over the prior art—such as those that give rise to unexpected technical effects or those that demonstrate the overcoming of technical prejudice—must be written in the claims. Otherwise, even if such features are disclosed in the specification, they shall not be considered when evaluating the inventive step of the invention.”
(Part II, Chapter 4, Section 6.4 — Examination of the Claimed Invention)

This requirement compels applicants to articulate the inventive aspects of their invention with greater specificity and precision within the claim language itself. If the key technical contribution is disclosed only in the specification but not incorporated into the claims, it will be disregarded during the inventive-step assessment, significantly weakening the invention’s patentability.

3. Stricter Standard: Features unrelated to the technical contribution do not support inventive step

The revised Guidelines also introduce restrictive provisions concerning irrelevant features, stating:

“Features that do not contribute to solving the technical problem will generally not affect the assessment of inventive step, even if they are written into the claims.”

“For an invention relating to a camera, the technical problem to be solved is how to enhance the flexibility of the shutter control. The solution is achieved through improvements to certain mechanical and circuit structures inside the camera. After the examiner indicated that the claims lacked an inventive step, the applicant amended the claims to add features including the shape of the camera housing, the size of the display screen, and the location of the battery compartment. However, the specification does not describe any correlation between these newly added features and the solution to the stated technical problem, … nor did the applicant provide evidence or sufficient reasoning demonstrating any additional technical effects brought to the claimed technical solution. Therefore, these technical features neither contribute to the technical solution nor impart any inventive step to the claimed invention.” (Part II, Chapter 4, Section 6.4 — Examination of the Claimed Invention)

The newly added example illustrates that when the technical problem of an invention is solved through improvements to the “internal structure,” any subsequently added external features—such as “housing shape or display size”—that bear no substantive relationship to the solution of that problem cannot be regarded as contributing to the inventive step. This reflects a more rigorous examination practice in which the functional relevance and technical contribution of each claimed feature will be scrutinized with greater precision.