Each year, the US Patent office releases its annual list of top 10 global private sector patent recipients. Listed below are the 10 corporations receiving the most U.S. patents for inventions in 2005, along with their 2004 ranking.
|
Preliminary Rank in 2005 |
Preliminary
# Patents in 2005 |
Organization
|
(Final Rank
in 2004) |
(Final Number
of Patents in 2004) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
1
|
2,941
|
International Business Machines Corporation |
(1)
|
(3,248)
|
|
2
|
1,828
|
Canon Kabushiki Kaisha |
(3)
|
(1,805)
|
|
3
|
1,797 *
|
Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. * |
(4)
|
(1,775)
|
|
4
|
1,688
|
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. |
(2)
|
(1,934)
|
|
5
|
1,641
|
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. |
(6)
|
(1,604)
|
|
6
|
1,561
|
Micron Technology, Inc |
(5)
|
(1,601)
|
|
7
|
1,549
|
Intel Corporation |
(7)
|
(1,513)
|
|
8
|
1,271
|
Hitachi, Ltd |
(8)
|
(1,893)
|
|
9
|
1,258
|
Toshiba Corporation |
(9)
|
(1,311)
|
|
10
|
1,154
|
Fujitsu Limited |
(11)
|
(1,296)
|
* Calendar year counts for 2005 for Hewlett-Packard Development Company, include seven patents issued to Hewlett-Packard Company.
By country, the list contains 5 Japanese firms (Canon, Matsushita, Hitachi, Toshiba, and Fujitsu) 4 US firms (IBM, HP, Micron, and Intel), and 1 Korean firm (Samsung).
By patent total, the 4 US firms garned 649 more patents than the 5 Japanese companies: 7,848 to 7,199, or about a 9% difference
Source:
USPTO Annual List of Top 10 Organizations Receiving Most U.S. Patents
January 10, 2006
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/speeches/06-03.htm
IBM’s patents are a joke – when I worked there, we were under substantial pressure to patent any and everything that might be able to sneak past an examiner, to the point where we’d joke that we’d discovered a new way to wipe our butts while leaving the mens’ room. They use them as a club against more innovative firms; they’re not, in and of themselves, any evidence of innovation at IBM.
I have one patent application on file from a subsequent job which, had I done this work at IBM, probably would have been 10 or 20 filings.
One that has probably been missing since the break up of AT&Tf but I would bet they used to be tops when there was an AT&T before spinning off Lucent and bascially closing Bell Labs.