Patenting Survey

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Frank Born

Mr Born founded the CAESAR Group along with Dr Kevin Kwiat to facilitate the transfer of Air Force technology to the commercial sector. Prior to this he was a research scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome NY. Mr Born has degrees in both Physics and Mechanical Engineering.

Latest posts by Frank Born (see all)

• Patenting Survey - February 24, 2020
• Tech Transfer in an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem - June 12, 2019
• AFRL Tech Portfolio - October 10, 2018

While looking at the Who, What, When and Where of US patents over the last ten years I have come across some interesting observations. I hope to share those observations in a series of posts over the next few weeks. One of the most striking observations is that here are definitely the “Haves” and the “Have-Nots” of the IP world. The “Haves” exist at multiple levels. Obviously, companies can be divided into haves and have-nots, but so also are states and cities and even countries. We must not forget that foreign entities hold a significant number of US patents.

When looking at the patent numbers for geographic areas and adjusting the raw patent numbers to identify the per capita patent rates, we were able to highlight the various hotbeds of patenting activity. Some of the results we saw were expected but others not so much. For example, when looking at all cities in New York State with a population of over 20k, we can see what localities stood out with their patenting. We found that, during the last decade, Schenectady, where GE is headquartered, has been issued over 3,300 patents per 10k residents. All other cities in NYS tally between 0 and 700 patents per 10k. Want to know the real leader in patents per capita in NYS? Armonk, NY (the headquarters of IBM). Because their population is only 4,300 it didn’t even make it into the list of cities in our initial evaluation. Armonk has had 175,000 patents granted per 10k population in the last 10 years!

Can conclusions be reached that correlate patent ownership to economic prosperity of a locality? If we think of Silicon Valley and Mountain View California the answer would clearly be “yes”, but how about Schenectady? They seem to point to the opposite conclusion. Without delving too deeply into social economic issues I hope to address this and other similar questions in future blog posts.