Strategy and Reporting
The USPTO Strategic Plan was created to help focus the USPTO's energy, to ensure that members of the organization are working toward the same goals, and to assess and adjust the organization's direction in response to a changing environment. This effort involves setting goals, and developing objectives for achieving those goals. As part of the strategic planning process, the USPTO's executive leadership team sought a broad range of perspectives from employees, customers and external stakeholders, in a bottom up, collaborative process. The results of the input received from employees and stakeholders were summarized and discussed by the leadership team, which formulated the final plan.
Download the USPTO Strategic Plan 2007-2012
Please e-mail questions regarding this plan to StrategicPlanning1@uspto.gov .
Fiscal Year 2009 Performance and Accountability Report (PAR)
Fiscal Year (FY) 2009 was a year of great economic turbulence for the United States as well as for the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Due to decreased patent filings and maintenance fee payments, the Agency found itself in a financial crisis and was forced to freeze hiring, curtail mission critical programs, and cut back in key efforts relating to the Agency’s mission. Although many of the financial forces are, to a large extent, beyond our control, we must nevertheless accomplish our statutory mission to foster innovation and competitiveness.
In 2009, the Agency began to lay the groundwork for new measures to address our biggest challenge – dramatically reducing the time it takes to process patent applications. Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke, has directed the USPTO to reduce first action pendency to 10 months and overall pendency to 20 months. Shortening pendency time is imperative to improve predictability and clarity in the patent system.
Highlights of USPTO performance accomplishments for the past year include:
- Patent and Trademark operations met or exceeded all of their goals for FY 2009.
- Patent examining operations increased first action productivity by 10 percent.
- Patent pendency ended the year at 25.8 months from filing to first action and 34.6 months until issue or abandonment.
- Patent applications filed electronically were 82.5 percent exceeding the FY 2009 target rate of 80 percent.
- Trademarks first action pendency was consistently maintained under three months every month for FY 2009.
- Trademark average total pendency continued to improve with disposal or registration occurring within 11.2 months from filing.
- Trademark applications processed electronically target of 62.0% was met.
- USPTO’s Global Intellectual Property Academy (GIPA) provided training to more than 2,226 officials from 128 countries on a variety of topics, including IP protection and enforcement, and technology transfer.
Download the FY2009 USPTO Performance and Accountability Report (PAR)
You can view previous reports by visiting the PAR archive.
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