The United States in number one…when it comes to intellectual property, that is.
American companies accounted for 64 percent of all firms around the world that were issued U.S. patents in 2010, up from 54 percent a year earlier, according to the latest Patent Power Scorecards, an annual tally of the global patent landscape from patent research firm 1790 Analytics and the electrical engineering trade publication IEEE Spectrum.
Japan was number two on the overall list, with Japanese companies accounting for 14 percent of all those global firms issued U.S. patents, a significant drop compared to the country’s 20 percent share in 2009. China, by contrast, also saw a small rise, with three Chinese companies making the scorecards for the first time (there’s a threshold of 25 patent awards to even be considered for the ranking), accounting for a little less than 1 percent of the 330 total companies around the world that made the list.
Chemical companies lead the way of America’s IP revival in 2010, IEEE Spectrum reported, with nine American chemical companies appearing on the chemicals scorecard, including newcomers to the list such as Eastman Chemical and Cabot.
The Patent Power Scorecards include 17 different lists of patent leaders, organized by industry, from aerospace to chemicals to electronics to universities.
But the single biggest winner on the 2011 list (which samples the patents from 2010, the latest time period for which comprehensive data is available) was to be found in the electronics space: Apple, Inc. was the “biggest mover” in Patent Power’s history, moving up from being awarded 110 U.S. patents in 2005, when the survey began, to 566 patents in 2010, a five-fold increase.
The 566 patents granted to the Cupertino, California company also don’t even include those patents Apple received through acquisitions and swaps, only those that were issued to Apple specifically by name.
Still, in terms of overall number of patents awarded, Apple’s portfolio pales in comparison to those of its competitors, including the overall total electronics leader in 2010, Samsung, which was awarded 3132 U.S. utility patents.
And yet, the Patent Power list still ranks Apple number one, because the ranking isn’t just a matter of quantity, but quality as well. The Patent Power list also takes into account qualitative categories such as patent “pipeline impact” — the frequency a company’s prior patents are cited by both that company and its competitors, and “pipeline generality,” — which measures the variety of different industries that site a company’s patents; the more industries, the more general the patent portfolio is.
“Apple’s commitment to innovation can be seen in both its number of patents, and the quality of these patents,” write 1409 co-founders Patrick Thomas and Anthony Breitzman. “Apple’s patents score much higher than the other companies’ patents for both Pipeline Impact (they are cited as “prior art” 70 percent more frequently than average) and Pipeline Generality (they are 37 percent more generally applicable than average). ”
Check out the entire collection of 2011 Patent Power scorecards in Flash and PDF for more granular detail on the companies that made the cut.
Also, on a related note, recall that President Obama in September signed into law the “America Invents Act,” a bipartisan bill designed to overhaul the U.S. patent system, changing it from a “first to invent” to a “first to file” system in an effort to cut down on the number of patent infringement lawsuits that are filed every year. The act is also supposed to cut through the three-year-plus long backlog of new patent applications at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Critics, especially those of medium and small-sized businesses, contend it favors larger competitors because larger companies have more legal resources and money to file patent applications and litigation.
Even if it works as intended, the law could sharply change the patent landscape, so stay tuned for the Patent Power list in subsequent years.
