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U.S. PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
Patent Technology Monitoring Team (PTMT)

PATENTING TRENDS IN THE UNITED STATES
1963-2008

- this report has been prepared with support from the National Science Foundation -

Description of the Report

The Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Patent Technology Monitoring Team, has established a Concordance between the U.S. Patent Classification System (USPCS) *, used to classify U.S. patent grants, and 30 product fields based on the 2002 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The Concordance is an update of a previous Concordance between the USPCS and the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system and is used to provide patent data, organized by product field, to the National Science Foundation (NSF), Science Indicators Unit. The report presents data according to state or country of origin.

Patents Included

The data used to prepare this report are U.S. utility patents granted during the period 1963 to 2008. Plant patents and design patents are not included.

Product Fields

This report contains profiles of patent activity by state and country of origin for the years 1963 to 2008 in each of 30 NAICS-based product fields. The 30 product fields consist of 26 unique product fields and 4 product fields that are combinations or ‘roll-ups’ of unique product fields. Another profile, titled ‘All Industries’, is a roll-up of the 26 unique product fields.**

In the profiles displaying utility patent activity, as distributed by NAICS-based product field, patent counts for each product field (based on the 2002 NAICS) are generated by using the primary classification associated with each patent along with a general concordance between the U.S. Patent Classification System and product fields based on the NAICS. This procedure results, in most cases, in the inclusion of the majority of patents relevant to the NAICS-based product field and few, if any, irrelevant patents. However, since the match between the NAICS system and the USPC is imperfect, the tables cannot be considered to include all relevant patents, nor to exclude all irrelevant patents. (More detail on the Concordance may be found in Review and Assessment of the OTAF Concordance between the U.S. Patent Classification and the Standard Industrial Classification System: Final Report, OTAF, 1984), available from PTMT. Please note that for classification by industry, NAICS has replaced the Standard Industrial Classification System (SIC).

‘Patent Grant’ Data and ‘Patented Application’ Data

The patents in the profiles of this report are distributed both by the year in which the patents were granted (pages labeled ‘Part A1’) and by the year in which the applications for those patents were filed (pages labeled ‘Part A2’). When distributed by year of patent grant, the data are referred to as ‘patent grant’ data. When distributed by year of application, the data are referred to as ‘patented application’ data. The report does not contain data for patent applications that were filed but did not result in a patent grant during the period 1963 to December 2008. Historically about 25% of all applications filed never result in a patent grant.

Data displaying patents, as distributed by their year of application, are of significant value since the date an application was filed more accurately reflects when the technology was developed. Additionally, fluctuations in patent data distributed by application date are much more likely to reflect changes in technological activity, since such fluctuations would for the most part be immune to changes in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) processing such as occurred in years such as 1986 when the USPTO issued fewer patents than would normally have been expected due to a lack of funds to print patents. Note that a patent's "pendency" can be quite variable from one patent to another thereby affecting the date of patent grant. Such variation in pendency is determined by many factors, including USPTO workload (which varies between technologies), budget and manpower levels, patent printing schedules, etc.

Since the average time period between the filing for a patent and the issuing of the patent (i.e., a patent's "pendency") is about 32 months, patent counts displayed in the tables that distribute counts by year of patent application are incomplete for the years 2000 - 2008. This is because a significant number of the applications filed from 2000 - December 2008, which will ultimately become patents, were still pending in December 2008. Since they had not yet become patents as of December 2008 (i.e., the patents included in these tables are limited to those patents that were granted from 1963 through December 2008), they are not counted in these tables.

As of 12/31/2008, utility patent application data were approximately 98% complete for patent applications filed in calendar year 2000, 93% complete for calendar year 2001 filings, 90% complete for calendar year 2002 filings, 78% complete for calendar year 2003 filings, 60% complete for applications filed in 2004, 37% complete for applications filed in 2005, and 17% complete for applications filed in 2006. They were essentially complete for applications filed prior to calendar year 2000.

Information in the Profiles

Patent origin, e.g., the United States, is determined by the residence of the first-named inventor. Ownership, e.g., corporate owned, is determined by the assignment of ownership at the time of grant, and corresponds to the information which appears on the face of the patent. Subsequent mergers, name changes, or ownership changes are not recorded in the TAF database. The term ‘corporation’ indicates that the assignee is a non-government organization. While the majority of non-government organizations are corporate entities, the term also includes organizations such as small businesses, universities, research foundations, and nonprofit institutions.

Fractional Counts and Whole Counts

This report contains two sets of profiles. One set uses 'Whole Counts' of patents. The other set uses 'Fractional Counts' of patents. In the 'Whole Counts' profiles, a single patent may be fully counted in as many as seven unique NAICS-based product fields. The 'Fractional Counts' profile eliminates this multiple counting of patents across product fields. Further explanation follows.

The USPC to NAICS Concordance assigns USPC patent subclasses to all (up to seven) identified NAICS-based product fields to which they are pertinent. For each of the 'Whole Counts' product field entries, a patent is counted if the patent's primary USPC classification subclass is matched, via concordance, to that product field. In the 'Whole Counts' entries, for example, if a patent has primary classification in a USPC subclass which is matched to 3 unique NAICS-based product fields, that patent would be counted once in each of the three associated 'Whole Counts' product fields. Consequently, that single patent would result in an effective total count of 3 patents if the three product fields are summed together (i.e., for 'Whole Counts' product field counts, the patent count for multiple product fields, summed together, would total more than the actual number of patents).

The counts displayed in the 'Fractional Counts' profile eliminates this multiple counting of patents by dividing each patent equally among the NAICS-based product fields to which the patent's primary USPC classification subclass has been matched, via the concordance. Using the example above, one-third of a patent count would be added to each of the 3 product fields matched with the patent's primary USPC classification subclass.

Except for minor differences due to rounding, the unique product field counts in the fractional counts profile should sum to the totals displayed in other PTMT utility patent statistical reports applied to the same time periods.

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* U.S. patents are classified in one or more subclasses of the U.S. Patent Classification System (USPC) depending on the content and claimed subject matter contained in the patent. One of these subclasses is designated as the primary classification of the patent (called the patent's 'original' classification, in USPTO-specific terminology), and the remainder, if any, are designated as 'cross-reference' classifications. In this report, only a patent’s ‘original’ classification is considered.

** It should be noted that the ‘All Industries’ table counts may differ slightly from those which appear in other TAF reports, such as the "All Technologies Report", due to different methodologies used to count patents.