In 1790 President George Washington signed the first US patent to Samuel Hopkins, for improvements in the "making of pot ash and pearl ash". Since then, more than 10 million patents have been granted in the US, giving protections to inventors, designers, artists and engineers for their ideas and intellectual property (IP).
The innovation acceleration
Of those 10+ million patents, almost half have been granted since the turn of the millennium, with the number of patent grants rising significantly in recent years. In 2020 the US Patent Office granted another 352,000 — just shy of the record from 2019 of 354,000.
Filing a patent is not easy, and comes at considerable cost. On top of the $400 filing fee, preparing a patent submission usually requires lawyers or experts, and the cost can routinely run into the thousands, if not tens of thousands, for particularly complex ideas or submissions.
That effort is why tracking patent grants is a decent proxy for innovation within an economy — albeit a very crude and simple one. Going to that effort is (presumably) only worth it for ideas deemed worth protecting.
Many of the patents are assigned to massive corporations. IBM for example has held the top spot for patents granted for the last 28 years (something the company is particularly proud of and mentions a lot), with IBM scientists and researchers being granted 9,130 patents last year. For a list of the top 50 companies, TechCrunch has you covered here.
