Patent News 4 - Michael White's Blog - "The Patent Librarian" recently had some patent statistics that caught my eye.
Who is the most prolific inventor?
Kia Silverbrook, founder of Silverbrook Research, a private R&D firm based in Sydney, Australia that specializes in inkjet printer technology received 577 US patents in 2008 (581 according to the USPTO). That works out to two patents a day.
Thomas Edison received only 1,093 patents in his 60-year career. As of Feb. 12, Silverbrook is credited as an inventor on 2,430 US patents and 3,435 published applications. According to Silverbrook Research's website, the firm has more than 1,800 patents and 2,000 pending applications and employs over 400 research scientists, engineers and support staff.
Anyone want to take a guess at his annual patent spending? I don't.
And University Patenting?
One other item from the same blog. A Chinese university is moving up the list of most active universities in patenting. U.S. universities have always dominated this list. The leaders are Univ. of California (252), MIT (228), Stanford (137), Caltech (115), and Wisconsin (99). But Tsinghua University (60), one of China's leading universities is now in tenth place.
Tsinghua is an impressive place. Sometimes referred to as the MIT of China. I visited there in about 1995 and was hosted by a mechanical engineering professor and his staff. I got a rather royal tour and a great meal in the faculty club.
Tsinghua has 44 research institutes, 9 engineering research centres and 163 laboratories, including 15 national laboratories.
Also coming up on the list is the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. They are now number 24. This seems to confirm a trend noted by the WIPO and other organizations: patent activity in Asia is increasing rapidly.
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